John Holt was a leading pioneer in re-examining public education, public educator's assumptions and theories. He began calling attention to where exactly the American compulsory school system came from and what students were really learning. They are learning but not what most people, right, left, or center think. Holt was also the major force behind the modern Homeschool movement. Today, John Taylor Gatto is more relevant & further along. But Gatto and the few others who insist compulsory and college schooling are not about education & probably never were owe much to John Holt. Holt began as a reformer but finally had to conclude the entire system must be shut down and education re-made anew from the ground up. I think both men go a little too extreme in their criticisms and their proposed solutions. Their extreme conclusions are not well supported. American education since 1870 has not been totally useless to a free people.
I recommend Holt to those few truly interested in education matters and issues. First, you may want to read the late philosopher Mortimer J. Adler's conclusions about education and schooling. They are not the same thing and probably never were. Fortunately, America's has its supply of people like Mark Twain who admitted: "I never let my schooling interfere with my education"
Holt knew that Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle despised professional teachers. Socrates observed that they soon turned schools into being about them, into fulcrums for serving up their interests. The three thinkers also concluded that people confuse education, schooling, & vocational training. Aristotle wrote "a vocational education is for slaves. higher learning is for free men."
John Dewey in his earlier and only truly major work, "Democracy and Education", echoed Aristotle. His elitist authoritarian education dogma that is echoed & aped today in our Schools of Education came after he became an ideological Fellow Traveler & basked in the Sunlight of "Papa Joe" Stalin whom he glowingly promoted in lectures presented to admiring professors of education. He got on so well with Stalin that Stalin strongly recommended Dewey to young Mao, China's new communist dictator. Dewey was extremely impressed with Mao too, after many months in China as Mao's personal guest. Perhaps education professors should compile a book about Dewey's hand in Mao's making of the Chinese working class.
I also recommend E.P. Thompson's classic, "The Making of the English Working Class" & what John Taylor Gatto has to say about the authoritarian, elite origins of the compulsory American school system. Aspiring teachers will not get introduction to these enlightening analyses in any Teacher's Education course.
Holt (and Gatto even more so) want you to know that our public schools are doing an efficient, fine job, depending on what you understand their assigned mission to be and on who actually determines that mission. It clearly isn't you and me.
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