A True Visionary

As the ever insightful list on the right side of my blog has long preceded me in showing, I've been reading John Holt's How Children Fail (1982 revised edition) for quite some time now. The unusually large span of time it has taken to finish is due, not to any flaw of the work itself, but to a strange (and highly erroneous) assumption I developed during the periods in-between my readings of it, namely, that whatever else I was doing at the time was almost certainly more interesting, or at least more enjoyable, than it. Thankfully, a few nights ago I returned to it as -get this- a sort of last resort, having long since discarded my DS for the night.

Naturally, I was enthralled. These last few days have seen it as my closest companion during those long periods of not sleeping that I so specialize in, and today, bearing the marks of a particularly spirited session of such the night before, I triumphantly reached it's climax. I may be wrong, but are books that are often referred to as "texts" actually supposed to be this interesting? Someone should make an inquiry.

The most striking thing about this book for me is not the philosophy he expounds in and of itself; this is, after all, the the very basis for how my sister and I have been raised for the past five years, so it's hardly foreign matter to me. No, what fascinates me about Holt's works is the way he arrived at this philosophy in the first place.

John Holt must have been one of the most empathetic and perceptive men to ever set foot in a classroom. How Children Fail is chock-full of the sort of revelations that seem at once obvious and profound. Holt's sympathy for the children he teaches, who are often harboring downright frightening quantities of fear and confusion, is unwavering, and his dedication to the philosophy of liberated, coercion-less learning is similarly great.

His examples of children afraid of failure resonate with me all the stronger because I can, though on a much less potent level, identify with them. Once upon a time, before the word unschooling was even in my vocabulary and my family practiced a form of fairly relaxed homeschooling, I was quite afraid of failing. I always wanting to get the answers right, to maintain the standard of quality I (and, I feared, others) had set for myself. I remember well the stinging feeling of finding that the math paper I had done was anything less than %100 perfect, despite my mother's urgings that grade didn't really matter. My fear was not even comparable to the poor children that Holt writes about, of course; thanks to the comparative openness and friendliness of my surroundings, I believe I was able to prevent this fear from ever becoming paralyzing, and was actually able to pick up a decent number of things. It was there, sure, but it didn't destroy me.

Riddle me this, though: If I was as nervous as I was in such a warm, friendly, non-pressuring environment, where I only had to do an hour or two's work in a day, how do you think my oversensitive, shy little mind, altogether too eager to please, would have handled those pressures full-time in a large, unfamiliar room full of unfamiliar faces.


-Smashing Brother


P.S: I was going to go on to write about my current experiences with FFVII, but on the whole decided that two such disparate subjects would not fit well together in the same post. That, and I attempted earlier to spell the word Wrong as Rong, which makes, in my opinion, a rather elegant case for me to get to bed posthaste.