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School’s Out is a book I read several years ago about just in time learning. More thought provoking ideas about educational reform…

“Learning was an activity thought to be confined to the box of a school classroom. Now learning permeates every form of social activity-work, entertainment, home life-outside of school. For what piano lessons cost, you can now buy an electronic piano that will teach you to play it…the fastest growing cable networks- The Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel- are devoted to learning. Of the more than sixty million Americans who learned how to use personal computers since 1980, most learned from vendors, books, other users, and the computers themselves, not in school.

Raw nostalgia for schooling as a cultural ritual, as a rite of passage, as a way of life, is as understandable as it is costly. Many of us justly have rich memories of school as a positive force for our development, maturity, and fulfillment-shared experiences with lifelong friends, the exhilaration and hoopla of athletic triumphs, dating rituals and first-time benchmarks in sexual coming of age, and even the occasional special teacher or coach who befriended us and piloted us past the reefs of adolescence toward a voyage of achievement.

But what we commonly overlook or misremember is what Star Wars guru Obiwan Kenobi called “the Dark Side of The Force”. Every yin has its yang. If we look honestly at what scientific study reveals about the dark side of schooling’s “socialization” we could conclude that the benefits can be obtained in other ways that are far less costly.”

I have read all of John Holt’s writings and he has influenced me more than any other educator. This is one of my favorite passages from his book “What do I Do Monday? He addresses the comment that so many people make about forcing children to do something they don’t want to do. I have also found that it rarely works to require a child to do something “for their own good”…

” More times than I can remember, teachers or parents have said to me, of some child, ” He didn’t want to do something, but I made him do it, and he is glad, and if I hadn’t made him he would have never done anything.” The other day a pleasant and probably kindly coach and swimming instructor told me about some child who hadn’t wanted to swim, but he had made him, and the child had learned and now liked it, so why shouldn’t he have the right to compel everyone to swim? There are many answers. The child might have in time learned to swim on his own, and not only had the pleasure of swimming, but the far more important pleasure of having found that pleasure for himself. Or he might have used that time to find some other skills and pleasures, just as good. The real trouble, as I said to the coach is this: I love swimming, and in a school where nothing else was compulsory I might see a case for making swimming so. But for every child in that school there are dozens of adults, each convinced that he has something of vital importance to “give” the child that he would never get for himself, all saying to the child, ” I know better than you do what is good for you.” By the time all those people get through making the child do what they know is good for him, he has no time or energy left. What is worse, he has no sense of being in charge of his life and learning or that he could be in charge, or that he deserves to be in charge or that if he were in charge it would turn out anyway other than badly. In short, he has no sense of his identity or place. He is only where and what others tell him he is.”

School’s Out, Lewis Perelman

It’s for Your Own Good, thoughts by John Holt