# Autodidact’s Progress **URL:** **By** Christopher Weber **Published:** December 1, 1979 --- “John Holt believes that one of society’s problems today is that too many people listen to experts.” _Never Too Late_, by John Holt. Delacorte Press: 245 pp., $10.00. Just last night as I write this, an acquaintance told me that tests made by the University of Vienna have “proved” that, as she put it, one only learns languages easily until the age of twenty-five. After that, she implied, you might as well forget it. We’ve all heard much the same sort of expert opinion about adults learning languages, and we’ve heard it applied to many other skills as well. John Holt believes that one of society’s problems today is that too many people listen to the “experts” who tell them what they can and cannot learn. Holt is of course best known for his ideas on education, his attacks on the public school system for actually inhibiting learning, and his contention that children are better off (as the title of his monthly newsletter puts it), “Growing Without Schooling.” What he has done in _Never Too Late_ is to buttress his theories by his own practical example. He uses his own experience with music to show both that adults can learn new skills and that, in large measure, they can do it on their own, without either teachers or lessons. He himself, with no musical training as a child, discovered music as an adult, took up the cello in his late 30s, and gradually became proficient enough at it, and enamoured enough of music, to give over several hours of each of his days to practice, and several evenings of each of his weeks to playing in orchestras, string quartets, and trios. John Holt came from a family that, if it wasn’t completely unmusical, at least never stressed music. When Holt’s mother was young, she had had some piano lessons, but Holt remembers her playing the piano only on one occasion, and then only as a joke. And “everyone knew” his father couldn’t sing: it was great fun for friends at parties to coax him into singing, and then roar with laughter after the first two or three notes. It was not until many years later, after Holt himself became musical, that he heard his father again on one of those occasions and realized that what “everyone knew” was wrong. “I discovered to my surprise that he sang it quite well, that if not dead on the tune he was very close to it.” He certainly had the requisite natural ability. At what point in his life, Holt wonders, did someone, perhaps a music teacher, “slam the doors to music in my father’s face?” my father’s face?” This happens every year to tens of thousands of children, perhaps at home, more likely at school. The children are told to sing a song. Some child does not get it quite right. Perhaps the other children laugh, or some child—I have known a few like this—says, “Teacher, he isn’t singing it right,” or the teacher points it out himself. Before long the suggestion is made that the child sing softly. “The child gets the idea. Something about his not being able to sing goes into his school record, so that later teachers will be alerted. And so the story is passed on.” Holt has found, in fact, that almost everyone can sing, if trained properly. His father’s “nonsinging” made him the center of attention at parties. It was, Holt states, his “parlour trick.” “The idea that he could not sing was not just a part, but a treasured part, of his notion of himself.” Many people “cling to and protect their images of themselves even when these images contain faults and weaknesses. It is easier to say “I’m a non-singer” than to face the risks and possible disappointments of learning to sing.” Holt’s musical passion began during prep school, where he braved the threats of punishment to listen after “lights-out,” to records of the “big-band” jazz groups then popular. His first real exposure to classical music came when he saw, at eighteen, the Walt Disney film _Fantasia_. It was Stravinsky’s _Rite of Spring_ that fired his imagination and stuck in his mind; and, as he says, “the images \[of dinosaurs battling\] certainly helped.” At prep school he joined the glee club: “What we were after was one more activity to list under our senior picture in the school year book.” And if he and his contemporaries had not much experience with singing, “at least we had never found any reason to dislike it. So into the Glee Club we went.” But what had begun as a fluke became a serious matter indeed, and all due to the teacher. “In four years at that school and four more at college, I remember only three or four teachers, if that many, who made me feel that they were deeply interested in, _loved_, what they were teaching.” When his choir had trouble slurring words without slurring them, this teacher would bare his teeth and show the tip of his tongue, pronouncing with extra clearness those ridiculous sounds. Of course we all laughed perhaps with more than a little mockery and contempt. He may well have heard this, but he didn’t care. What was important was not his dignity as a faculty member, but the music, getting the words right. Slowly, Holt began to realize that “if he isn’t afraid of making a damn fool out of himself, maybe I don’t have to be afraid of making a damn fool of myself.” He came to college “eager to sing.” But when he tried out for the Glee Club there, he was rejected for having a “foggy, throaty, wheezy” voice. While obviously not a first-rate, or even a second-rate singer, Holt still can’t understand why at that rich school, no provision was made for students who only wanted to sing for the “mere” joy of singing. People who know of my love for music today often say to me, “Don’t you wish that your parents had made you take music lessons when you were little?” The answer is, No, I don’t. I think that forced exposure would probably have turned me away from music, as it has so many others. But it still makes me regretful, and angry, that when I found out, almost by accident, that I loved making music and wanted more than anything to make some more, a rich university, dedicated (so they say) to the higher things of life, could have found nothing better to do than to slam the door in my face. Holt’s musical life began in high school. During dismissal one day he heard a girl playing a Chopin Prelude on the piano in a practice room. He had never heard classical music before. “I could not get that music out of my head,” he says. He learned the music on the piano at home, though he had to teach himself to play. His first efforts were crude, but he was soon hooked, playing almost every day. During his senior year of college, he learned to play the recorder. He wanted to play with friends, but to find partners he had to learn other instruments. After some experimentation he took up the cello. “I thought it the most beautiful sound I had ever heard,” Holt says. He then went to a music store in Boston to buy a used cello and a book. “The man in the music store didn’t seem to think that I could learn the cello by myself. He was really quite rude. ‘You can’t learn to play an instrument out of a book!’” Holt played every day, as he says, with “patient, steady practice and a readiness to listen to my playing critically, to try to hear what was wrong and to hear what was right.” He also listened to recordings of the music he was learning. He kept his mind open to all kinds of music, not only classical, but jazz, country, folk, and the music of other cultures. Eventually Holt was able to get a professional cellist for a teacher. Holt makes the point that listening to others can teach us a great deal. “My own father’s attitude was that listening to other people’s playing would make me a mere imitator of them, and would thus cut off, or at least lessen, my own originality. This view is very common and very wrong.” Holt maintains that we learn most of what we know of music (and of other things) by listening to what others do. What he argues against is forced imitation, not exposure to others’ models. He says that listening to others playing their instruments is analogous to reading and listening to others talk; we learn to speak and write by copying and imitating what others do, and not by being forced to follow certain models. “By listening to others,” Holt says, “I have learned not only a great deal about music and technique, but a great deal about music and the many myriad images and meanings, ticularly at Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. What drew him to that particular music \[was\] that in some respects it was very like the jazz-swing music I already knew and loved. The relationship between the classical orchestra and soloist was much like it was with jazz. The orchestra stated the themes, and the soloist improvised on and around them, commenting on them. As a tip to newcomers to classical music, he suggests, when hearing a piece for the first time, that you let the music wash over you and listen for passages, however short, which catch your ear. Soon, “the special quality of that passage begins to spread out into the rest of the music.” Those who meet classical music for the first time, be they children or adults, should be able to meet it as simply “a great feast of sound, to be enjoyed for its own sake, without having to worry much about when or how it was made or what it is called or what it means. Let astonishment and delight come first; curiosity, questions, thought and understanding will come later.” Buying a guitar, and still knowing no music, Holt played the few chords he knew mostly because “the sound and vibrations were immensely soothing and relaxing.” He soon went to Europe, however, and never again took it up. In London he attended a few orchestra concerts and began to learn what various other musical instruments looked and sounded like. He bought a record player there, took it back with him, and began to buy or borrow classical records. These years, in short, were characterized by Holt’s learning to listen, and standing back in awe as a whole new world unfolded before him. ## I can do it too The “breakthrough,” the realization that learning to play an instrument was within his power, and not something superhuman, came one day when, thinking about string players, he asked himself for the thousandth time, “How do they know where to put their fingers?” The he thought back to the time he “learned” to make his whistles higher or lower. While only making sounds, he tried to realize what was happening in his mouth. “I soon realized that when I whistled a high note I brought the tip of my tongue very close up behind my lips,” while low notes came when his tongue was drawn back and down in his mouth. The point was that, when he wanted to produce a certain note, he didn’t so much “know” where to put his tongue as he “just put it there, it goes where it’s meant to go, and the note comes out.” That was just how string players knew where to put their fingers! “Words can barely describe how I felt.” Music would indeed be difficult for him to learn, but it would not be impossible. So, at the age of 34, he bought a flute and began to take lessons. While he was fortunate enough to have a teacher who had him play “real music,” as opposed to mere exercises, his progress was sporadic. For it was in these years, the late 1950s, that he began to think about and write down those ideas on education which had grown from his schoolteacher’s job, and for which he is now famous. He still thought of music as only a pleasant diversion, and of progress as something his teacher defined and certified: “I was not yet ready to be at the center of my own learning.” Not surprisingly, he soon stopped playing. Several years passed, during which he listened more continually to both records and live symphony performances. Then one day he bought a used cello, on a fluke. Months later came the first lessons. He was 39 years old. This time he stuck to it. He had gotten over his fear of failure by six years of trying to get his school children to get over theirs. Also, his new teacher soon had him playing (like the first) the music he knew and loved. “He knew that the beauty of the music would inspire me” to work in his own way on those problems which exercise books address themselves to. Further, he encouraged Holt in the habit of picking notes at random and bowing them, “for the sheer joy of hearing the sounds coming from the instrument.” Instead of being upbraided for this, Holt was told “But that’s the best thing you could possibly do. After all, the whole point of what we’re doing is to make a lovely sound.” Holt began a two-year regimen: rise at 4:30 am, practice for two hours at a nearby school, go home and sleep more, “do other kinds of work,” go back to the school to coach his soccer team, eat dinner, and return to the school for practice. (He couldn’t practice at home: the cello’s vibrations disturbed his neighbors.) It began to pay off. He joined an amateur orchestra and string quartet for the vital practice of playing with other people. He even began to give cello lessons, to the son of a friend. The small orchestra was soon forced to disband, as their practice hall became unavailable, and no substitute could have been found. “The city was full of classrooms, unused in the evening which would have been fine for us, but no one would let us use them.” (Another example of how the public “education” system actually stifles education.) Then, for the second time, music dropped out of Holt’s life. This time, though, he dropped it regretfully. After his first books, _How Children Fail_ and _How Children Learn_ came out, his fame began to spread. More and more of his time was being spent teaching, traveling and lecturing. So if during the years 1966-1973 he spent most of his time away from Boston, he spent all of it away from his cello. But not, however, away from music. Wherever he happened to find himself he heard the local orchestra. After one of these concerts he met the cellist Janos Starker at a party. They got to talking about adults learning to play music. It was obviously hard, Starker said; “we have to develop a whole new set of muscles” and coordinations. “On the other hand, we \[adults\] have an advantage: We can think up problems, and find solutions.” These words strengthened Holt’s “hunch, hope and faith that old dogs can learn new tricks,” and what’s more, “learn them better than young dogs— once they get over the notion that they can’t learn them.” These few words, along with a less perceptible development taking place at that same time, led Holt back to music, and moreover, put it at the center of his life. This less perceptible development had nothing directly to do with music. Rather it was political. For several years, Holt and others interested in educational reform had taught seminars in Mexico at a conference organized by Ivan Illich. Holt began to realize that the problem with modern society went far deeper than schools. “The trouble was that people had become what Illich called institutionalized,” believing that everything they wanted or needed “could ony be supplied by some large, complicated, expensive, run-from-the-top organization.” This instead of relying on themselves, or cooperative enterprises. “What people used to do in order to meet their felt needs, now became things people try to get.” They turn verbs into nouns, like the words > To most people, learning is not an _activity_, but a _product_ available only at school. “learning” or “housing.” To most people, “learning is not the activity of finding out about this or that, something that anyone can do, but a product obtained from and in schools.” People are told that they must go to experts to get what they need, that they themselves are incompetent to even decide what they need. All this had a direct influence on Holt’s decision to take up the cello again: If I could learn to play the cello well, as I thought I could, I could show by my own example that we all have greater powers than we think; that whatever we want to learn or learn to do, we probably can learn; that our lives and our possibilities are not determined and fixed by what happened to us when we were little, or what experts say we can or cannot do — in short, my love for music now seemed more and more joined to my love of teaching and to my deepest political concerns. The gap I had felt between my work and my hobby had disappeared. Holt returned to the cello with a dedication—indeed, a fervor—that no child could summon. Always with Starker’s sentence in mind—“We can think up problems and find solutions”—Holt did just that. He invented new and easy ways to discover whether his string instruments were in tune. He came up with an easier way to learn musical intervals (e.g., a fourth is the tone distance, or interval, between do and fa—_do-re-mi_—fa.) But this do-re-mi method was difficult to apply to the written score, and hindered score reading. Holt thought, with his head full of tunes, why not learn the intervals from the music he already knew? These came from many sources: the interval of the fourth came out of the first two notes of the old Dixieland jazz piece, “South Rampart Street Parade”; for the sixth, he took the first two notes of the old NBC signature tune. “But many intervals come from the classics. For the falling sixth I use the first two notes of the Second Chopin Piano Concerto, long one of my favorites.” Others, of course, would have to use their own mental library of stored music, but this way of going about it makes the task much easier, and further, is something with which adults have a distinct advantage over children. ## Learning without lessons Many people seem taken aback when Holt, upon being asked, tells them he isn’t studying with anyone. For the usual needs beginners or intermediate players turn to teachers to meet are in Holt’s case met through his own resources. “One of the reasons students take lessons is so they will practice . . . (But) I like to play four hours a day, more if I can.” Then, teachers can provide “the right” music to practice or play. But through years of listening to records and attending concerts, Holt knows enough music “for the lifetime . . . . Time is my problem, not ignorance about what to play.” Teachers also suggest ways to organize practice time. Holt found this helpful at the beginning, but now keeping variety in his practice is, for him, an interesting problem in itself. And while teachers can show what good cello playing looks and sounds like, “From records and from seeing and hearing many great cellists,” he already knows well what he wants his playing to look and sound like. Finally, “I don’t need weekly judgments about my progress, either to scold or reward. The metronome, the tapes I sometimes make of my own playing . . . tell me.” For advanced pupils, on the other hand, the right teacher can convey the vitally important art of stressing or tap-ering notes to bring out “the nuances of feeling” beneath the written score. Holt says he would like nothing better than to study with such a teacher. But he isn’t good enough yet. There are, of course, problems in learning the cello; it is not easy. Holt has had to give up activities he enjoyed for years to “clear the space” for his two passions of educational writing and music making. His days are filled with battles over devoting time to just these two: “Both the writer and the musician want full time.” And there are times, when playing, that he gets discouraged, feels he’s making no progress. What he says about that applies to any adult taking up any new skill, and thus proving the “experts” wrong: “What I am slowly learning to do in my work with music is revive some of the resilient spirit of the exploring and learning baby. I have to accept at each moment, as a fact of life, my present skill or lack of skill, and do the best I can, without blaming myself for not being able to do better. I have to be aware of my mistakes and shortcomings without being ashamed of them. I have to keep in view the distant goal, without worrying about how far away it is or reproaching myself for not being already there. This is very hard for most adults. It is the main reason why we old dogs so often find it so hard to learn new tricks, whether sports or languages or crafts or music. But if as we work on our skills we work on this weakness in ourselves, we can slowly get better at both.” Christopher Weber writes frequently for LR.