More Choice, Less Fear

John Holt has taught English, French and mathematics at the elementary and junior high school levels in the Boston school system. His experiences drove him to write How Children Fail in 1964—a book which The New York Review of Books ranked with the works of Piaget for its author's ability to "get into the mind of the child."

How Children Fail was quickly followed by How Children Learn and The Underachieving School, which discusses the possibility of giving kids the freedom to learn within—and despite—the traditional educational structure.

What Do I Do Monday? was John's response to teachers who were interested in improving their work. As such, it has generated a new genre of "how to" books: how to make teaching—in Neil Postman's phrase—"a subversive activity."

John's latest book, Freedom and Beyond, steps outside the classroom to examine the validity of the student-teacher, adult-child dichotomy in society at large.

In addition to writing and lecturing, John has served as consultant with the Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The interview was conducted by Outlook editors Walter Block and Frank X. Richter, along with Lee Schubert and Emilia Nordtvedt. Mr. Schubert is a member of the executive committee of the Free Libertarian Party of New York; Ms. Nordtvedt teaches education at Paterson College in New Jersey.

Outlook: Can you begin by telling us what sort of experiences as a schoolteacher led you to become a proponent of rather radical changes in our educational system?

Holt: Well, before I got into teaching in a classroom in a school, I had a lot of contact with young people. I worked with the World Federalists after the second world war. I did a lot of traveling, staying with members of the organization, and without having planned it that way, I became what you might call an extra uncle in about 50 families. Now, at that time I had no idea of becoming a teacher. I was not in those families to observe children, but I got to know a lot of young people. Even after I started teaching I was very interested in very young children. Friends of mine who had very little children, knowing that I liked them, were glad to have me around. I observed children and adults with each other in public places—airplanes, airports, bus stations, bookstores—so I've done an awful lot of observing of this outside of schools and classrooms. I suppose these ideas have been slowly generating in my mind.

Outlook: What were the major things that you observed that brought you to your present position?

Holt: For one thing, I began to see that the behavior of an awful lot of young children in the company of adults was strained and forced. I saw little kids of 3 or 4 putting on performances—long before we think of children of having reached an age at which they do things to please or appease adults. I began to sense very early that relationships between adults and their children often are not very good. So I began to wonder why these relationships were so bad.

My work as a teacher and educational reformer has also turned me toward these questions. I've come to feel more and more that a lot of the troubles we've had in our schools are not basically school troubles but arise out of the fact that one of the very important functions of schools is to keep children in childhood.

Outlook: Excuse the digression, but I can't help noticing that you are wearing a large McGovern sign on your hat, and a McGovern button on your lapel. Do you see any relationship between what you are trying to accomplish as an educator and the election of McGovern?

Holt: My principle reason for being for McGovern is the war, although I have been interested in what he has said about income redistribution. A guaranteed income seems to be a necessary precondition not only of doing the kinds of things I'm interested in with respect to children, but also of making much progress in the environmental problem. If most people feel that the only thing that stands between them and personal economic disaster is something called continued economic growth, it's going to be very difficult to achieve some kind of balance. McGovern's educational proposals are really quite conventional. His position is to spend more money on schools. So that's not the part of his campaign that interests me most.

Outlook: How about school busing? That would seem to be one thing that McGovern is somewhat famous with regard to, and that has something to do with schools.

Holt: Well, what he's said about it mostly is that . . . he has stressed the fact that it's basically a matter for state governments.

My view is that no young person should either be prevented from going to a school he wants to go to or compelled to go to a school that he doesn't want to, solely because of the color of his skin—or, for that matter, the size of his parents' pocketbook. By that criterion, the Wallace anti-busing people are mistaken, but so are the judges who order city-wide school integration programs. Given the present political climate I don't think these kinds of programs will be carried out, and even if they were, I don't think that they would in fact solve any of what we think of as educational problems.

This leads me to a point that I made at some length in Freedom and Beyond, which is that if we want to do away with poverty in this country, which I doubt the people on the whole do, we would have to recognize that poverty is not a school problem, and is not going to be abolished by doing this or that or the other thing in the schools. It's going to take other kinds of social and economic measures, for which we have models in the Scandinavian countries. So, in a very real sense, our pretense—I don't mean to imply that it's deliberately dishonest—our pretense that the problem of poverty can be solved in school is kind of an evasion.

Outlook: While we're on the subject of governmental laws about education, how do you feel about compulsory education laws?

Holt: I'm against compulsory school attendance laws because I would say that it is not the business of the state to decide what we think, and hence it is not the business of the state to tell us what we should know or learn. Not only shouldn't there be compulsory school attendance laws, I don't think the state should have a monopoly on the school business. I don't think the state should be able to set something called educational requirements whether these are met in or out of school.

Outlook: You've been known to state that adults have to stop thinking of kids as cute. I'd like to confess that I think both of my kids are very cute, and not only that, but that the word "cute" is one which I apply in complimentary terms to a lot of kids and a lot of men and women. Now I wonder if you could define the word for me in a way that would help me to understand why you think it's degrading when applied to children.

Holt: What most people do when they look at some small child and think of thim as cute and get misty eyes and a warm feeling in the stomach is very close to the kind of type-casting or lump labelling that large numbers of men do when they look at a woman who, by our standards, is pretty. They let that definition obscure whatever there may be in her that is unique. I suppose Marilyn Monroe was a kind of classic case of somebody whose unique personal identity was completely submerged and overwhelmed by a surface appearance.

The thing that is very likely to happen with small children who are particularly handsome, good looking by little children standards, is that adults, without even knowing that they're doing it, are likely to use these children to generate warm stomach feelings in themselves. In other words, they're likely to exploit the cuteness of the children to make themselves feel good. The children in turn discover—again at a level below words—that they can use their cuteness to get things out of adults, and a game of mutual exploitation is liable to begin which is very destructive.

The children who are most likely to do this are very pretty little girls, and my observation of a lot of these in and out of school is that they have picked up all kinds of artificial mannerisms which I now recognize quite quickly. Little mincing ways of walking, things they don't do when they're all by themselves, or when they're unobserved. These kinds of mutually exploiting relationships can be very destructive, destructive of the natural growth of the child and destructive of the kinds of relationships that ought to grow between adults and children.

Outlook: You talk about these kind of mutually exploiting relationships as being very destructive of the growth potential of the child . . . .

Holt: A thing just came into my mind. What I say to myself when I look at a 3-year-old, 4-year-old; who strikes me as being cute. Much of it is perfectly legitimate. There are all kinds of genuinely admirable qualities about these little children, and partly we're responding to them. But part of our reaction is not so admirable; we don't usually feel the same way about little children that are homely as we do about those that are pretty. When I look at a little child doing something and think about how cute he is, I have to say, "He doesn't feel cute." Whatever he's doing right now, he's very serious about it, whether it's making a mud pie or drawing a picture. He's very serious about his business. I owe him the kind of respect, a certain gravity and courtesy, that I would owe someone of any age.

I think of another instance. I'm talking about a young girl 13 years old, whom I know very well, a very bright, articulate person whose mother is one of the very best parents that I've ever known. Anyway, this young person was talking very animatedly and seriously about something that was of great importance to her, and her mother was watching her. Suddenly I could see in the mother's face that she was overcome by a kind of feeling which I shared a little myself: "Look at this phenomenon. I remember when this person was only a year old. I remember when . . . isn't it extraordinary?" A great wave of perfectly understandable motherly tenderness came over her, it showed on her face, and this young person caught it and instantly stopped talking. She was deeply offended, although they're really very fond of each other; it's a very happy family. The young person suddenly realized that she was not being looked at and listened to as she had been a minute earlier, as a human being with thoughts, but now as a kind of cute child, and she clammed up.

Outlook: What do you think are the effects of our present method of treating children?

Holt: To a very large extent, our way of treating children, including the ones we approve of, that is, think of as cute, destroys an enormous amount of their self-respect, their ability to take themselves seriously. Now in the case I just talked about, the mother is generally so respectful of the children that this is not a usual problem in that family. But in other families this is a very serious problem, the feeling on the part of the young people that they are not taken seriously, and therefore cannot take themselves seriously.

I've spoken of mutually exploitive relationships. The problem is that in many families people get some kind of notion of an ideal, capital-C child, and they're constantly comparing this living human being with that ideal. This goes on at a lot of subtle levels. If it were more conscious, it might be less dangerous because then we could deal with it. We are so likely to conjure up an ideal picture of not only this child but how he will relate to us and we to him, that when he departs from this scenario and begins acting in other ways, we're disappointed. We may not be angry; there may be no threats of punishment. We're disappointed, he senses our disappointment, and he begins to look at us for signals as to how he may live up to our expectations. So a whole cycle of reciprocating events develops, which makes it very difficult for what I would call an authentic human relationship to grow up between parent and child.

Outlook: R.H. Laing, in Politics of the Family, talks about the mapping operations of the family, projecting qualities onto people. He suggests that the family tries to dissuade certain behavior by identifying it over and over again. You know, "Johnny is so irresponsible." Or, "Mary, you're so sloppy." Eventually, the child thinks of himself or herself as irresponsible Johnny or sloppy Mary. And, you know, we have a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was wondering to what extent you would agree with that.

Holt: I would agree with that very much. My understanding of Laing is that the really serious thing he's talking about, and certainly a part of what I'm talking about, is the type of situation in which a child is getting messages from a parent at one level which conflict with messages he's getting from another level. Now there's liable to be a big controversy on the matter of dependence and independence. Verbally, "I want you to be independent; I want you to decide for yourself." Whereas in fact, he wants the child to remain dependent, he wants to boss him.

Outlook: "And don't be so obedient!" What about that?

Holt: That's a very good example of a conflicting sort of message. But aside from being conflicting, the messages are so obscure that a child has to work too hard to find out what is expected of him This is liable to be true in a family where the relationships are pretty good. In a family in which the kids don't get on too well with the parents, in some ways the burden is lighter. The child could care less about whether Mom or Pop is happy about what he does as long as he stays out of their way and out of trouble. Growing up that way has its disadvantages, but it has its simplicities. In a family where there seem to be pretty strong bonds of affection, unless the parents are extraordinarily and by a great effort of will respectful of the individuality of their child, there is very likely to be at the lower level of consciousness this mutual game of, "You do what I want or I'll be disappointed in you; but you mustn't look as if you're doing it just to please me." "Don't do it just to please me"—this is something that you get between men and women also.

I don't think this can be remedied by heightening the consciousness of the families themselves. I think the alternative, the cure, has got to be for a young person to have a considerable number of other relationships with other adults which are not so highly charged, in which not so much is at stake. I know how important in my growing up an uncle was to me; it wasn't that big a deal, so we could talk, we could fight. We argued like cat and dog on all sorts of stuff. There weren't those terrible penalties hanging in the air. No, "If I say the wrong thing, he'll be angry at me . . . ." There should be such relationships available to a young person. The nuclear family is too possessive, too intense; too much depends on everything, too much is at stake all the time.

Outlook: Some educators take the view that one of the advantages of compulsory education is that you can pull the kids together and get them to relate to one another, get them relating to their peers. I was wondering to what extent you feel that the traditional classroom helps kids relate to each others.

Holt: It interferes with it in a terrible way, because the traditional classroom is a racetrack, and it isn't even a racetrack in as objective a sense as a genuine racetrack. It's a place where the children are competing against each other for the approval, the favor, of the teacher. Nobody can win except at everybody else's expense. The chance that good human relationships develop in that kind of a cutthroat situation is extraordinarily slight.

No, I think young people definitely need many places, not just schools, but many places which are safe, interesting, where they can congregate with people more or less of their own age—I don't mean this as restrictive as it is in school. There ought to be a whole lot of places in any community where young people, children, may safely go and find things to do. But this doesn't happen in the ordinary school which is both in what I call the jail business and the racetrack business, both of which defeat its real humane purposes.

Outlook: Children are born knowing very little, or nothing. They have a lot to learn to function at the adult level. What institutions, structures, methods, do you think are best for getting them from the first state to the final state?

Holt: How do you find out how a society works? By being in it as much as possible. I should say, by the way, that young children are enormously curious about their society and how it works. What we've done is to take them out of that society, remove them from contact with a whole bunch of realities—work, life, death, religion and ceremony—and we put them in these grim boxes we call schools. And then we think we can make up for this by having a "relevant" curriculum. It can't be done that way. The point is to lower the barriers between young people and their society. Most of the children who ever lived on the earth grew up in the middle of their society. They were surrounded by all the realities of it: religion, ceremony, aging, disease, birth, death, sex, war. Whatever went on went on all around them. And now, as I say, we've isolated children from this society, and it's very difficult for them to find out about it—particularly since when they ask us questions we usually don't tell the truth. We have sort of institutional kinds of answers. We're not really on the level with them.

Outlook: Could you give us an example of what you mean?

Holt: Well . . . most children are not encouraged to find out in school, let us say, how much corruption or crime there is in their particular community. It takes you a lot longer in life to find out, to find out how to find out which walnut shell the pea is under.

Outlook: There are some people who would say that we're protecting children from harsh realities; and that to the extent the kids are imaginative and seemingly free and happy, it's precisely because they are ignorant. How do you feel about that?

Holt: I think the people who say it are pretty sincere, on the whole, and I probably once would have said it myself. But I don't agree with it. Mind you, under certain circumstances and in a certain time it might have been true. A lot of children's literature came out of the upper middle country classes in Great Britain; the classics of children's literature depict children living in a very isolated, idyllic environment. Christopher Robin out there in the countryside, and all. If it were true that we could shelter children from a lot of these realities, a case might be made for a certain length of time for doing it. Indeed, I've always agreed with Paul Goodman when he said a lot of city kids, anxious, terrified city kids, need some space, quiet, repose in their lives. It's not quite the same thing as shelter. Today we can't shield children from the realities of what goes on. Even if we forbade them to look at the television set, they'd learn a lot of it simply by walking around on the streets.

Outlook: They also learn, don't they, that there are awful terrible things that have to be hidden. Maybe that's how we all become fearful.

Holt: Yes, I don't think ignorance is bliss, I've never believed that. The advantages of knowing the score, of having some sense of what really goes on, is that, if you can't do something about what the future is bringing, at least you can get ready for it. No, ignorance is the opposite of bliss.

Outlook: You seem to be stressing what I would call a romantic view of childhood. Do you think of children as beings possessed of beautiful attributes and exciting potentialities which become for the most part corrupted and frustrated by contact with adults?

Holt: I'm not romantic about children. I don't take some sort of Rosseauean or Wordsworthian position about the innocence or purity of children. I think that in general children have a lot of qualities, some of which are drawbacks and disadvantages. I think their ignorance is a handicap, as is their inexperience, their self-centeredness, their initial lack of empathy, their inability to put themselves in the other person's shoes, their lack of any time sense, their vulnerability to their own passions. All of these are qualities for which I feel compassionate, but which I would want to help them grow out of. On the other hand, there are a large number of human qualities which I think children possess in large degree: energy, vitality, enthusiasm, hopefulness, trustfulness, curiosity, resourcefulness, veracity, expressiveness—I could probably think of a bunch of others—which are altogether admirable qualities in a person of any age. And, on the whole, I think a great many of these qualities are indeed repressed, diminished, stamped out by their contact with adult society and its institutions. I think a great many of them are lost precisely because we define them as childish and therefore cute and therefore something that we ought to grow out of. We in that sense invalidate them.

Outlook: You stated earlier that you don't want the state to have a monopoly on education. Do you want the state to have any say in education at all? For instance, to make an analogy with Madalyn Murray O'Hair's advocacy of absolute separation of church and state, would you advocate a strict separation between education and the state?

Holt: I don't know what you mean by separation. The public library, for example, seems to me to be a legitimate educational institution, and as things stand it's operated by state funds, tax-supported funds.

The question of whether the state ought to tax or not is certainly a question of some importance to libertarians. I don't want to get into it very much here because it's not a matter of primary importance to me, so to speak.

Outlook: Of course libertarians do not oppose libraries per se; our objection is to the way in which they are presently financed. But let's look at another aspect of the state's involvement in education. Could it not be said that state education amounts to brainwashing? You know, teaching the pledge of allegiance and how to salute and that you must raise your hand when you want to go to the bathroom—the sort of things that prepare one for faith in state authority in later life. Would you go along with an attack on state education on this basis?

Holt: I think it is absolutely not the business of the state to say what people will learn. Should the state allow tax money to be spent on a school and then not control the curriculum? It's a difficulty.

I don't think that schools are very helpful for most kinds of learning anyway. I would also say in passing that practically everything that I know of that I don't like in state-run schools is also done in most private schools. So it's difficult to tell how schools should be financed; I don't have passionate feelings either way.

If we say schools are a kind of legitimate learning instrument, but that they should not be financed by the state, we have a very real problem: then people with more money would get all the schools. For me, a kind of remedy would be to provide other kinds of learning arrangements which are much less expensive than schools, or to encourage and legitimize arrangements in which people are not made dependent on professionals.

Outlook: Perhaps even lousy private schools are better, in a sense, than lousy public schools. If you have a lousy private school, at least parents can refuse to patronize it; they can support the schools they like. In the public schools, on the other hand, parents' money goes there no matter how they feel about it. They have no way of withdrawing their sanction.

Holt: I agree.

Outlook: So then you favor a lousy private school over a lousy public school on the ground that we have more control over the private school?

Holt: You do if you have an option. Now, the laws of the state, the compulsory school attendance laws, require that your child be in some school. If the only school that you can afford is a public school, then you really don't have any more choice than you did before. Or if we have a situation in which schools have, as they have now, a monopoly on the legitimizing of learning—if you haven't learned it in a school, it's as if you didn't know it—under this circumstance the freedom of choice for the parent is not very real. The maximum choice is not between this school or that school or some other school but the choice of not having anything that the state would recognize as a school.

Outlook: Well, another case for lousy private schools sort of counters something you said, namely, that if we had private schools, then only the rich would get education. It seems to me that the times that I've been in museums or libraries with children in them, I've very rarely seen black or Puerto Rican kids. I've seen an awful lot of white kids. It seems that far from redistributing money from the rich to the poor, the state educational system works the other way.

Holt: I quite agree. However, I don't see how a private system would be very different. Mind you, we have a private system now—the parochial schools—and I don't think anybody will say that parents have very much to gain. A case could be made that through the machinery of school management, cumbersome and bad as it is, parents in a community have more to say about what goes on in public schools than the parents do about what goes on in parochial schools.

Outlook: But parents of parochial school children are free to remove their children—as well as their money—while parents of public school children are not.

Holt: People are talking about voucher plans. I think as long as most of the learning opportunities are in school, that money should be put into the hands of learners or families of learners for them to spend on what kinds of schools they like best.

Outlook: How about going one step beyond that? Instead of the state taking money from the people and giving it back to them in the form of vouchers, I would just as soon the state didn't take it from them at all.

Holt: There's a good case to be made for that.

Outlook: Let's imagine that schools and educational institutions had to stay as they were. The bureaucracy had to stay as it was. Construction had to stay as it was. But I have gathered together all of the teachers for you to talk to, and you could make one change in these teachers, their attitudes, or the way they went about teaching. What would you say to them?

Holt: It's a very iffy question . . . .

Outlook: We have teachers among our readers. That's why I asked.

Holt: Large numbers of teachers have told me that they cannot make any important changes in the way in which they work. I can say: "Stop threatening your children with grades"—and they would say, "I have to give grades." Or I could say any one of a number of things which I've been saying to meetings of teachers for years, and they would come back and say, "But if I did that I'd get fired." So I can't take the question out of the here and now tactical situation that a particular teacher finds him or her self in. I once summed up in four words what I was trying to say about schools and classrooms: more choice, less fear.

Now, how a particular teacher puts that into practice, I don't know. But we have to recognize that a great many teachers are full of fear themselves, and one of their greatest fears is that if they don't make the children obey, they will run wild. One of the things I found in my own work as a teacher was that I was trying to ride a horse in opposite directions at the same time. What I was giving with one hand I was taking away with the other. On the one hand I was trying to make my students less fearful because I could see that fear was preventing them from learning. But on the other hand I was part of the machinery which ran on fear. Why would they do this stuff at all? I wanted them to be less afraid so they'd learn these fractions. This stuff isn't worthwhile. There's no reason to learn. I say to teachers when I talk with them, and I say it in my books: Within whatever constraints you're in; try to maximize choice, try to cut down competition; try to make it possible for the children to work together and help each other and so forth. A lot could be done in any classroom if the people want to. I think, in general, if teachers were given more freedom than they would like, they almost all have much more freedom than they think, or than they use.

Outlook: I would agree with that.

Holt: You see, we run into this: why are a lot of people teaching? What is there about the business aside from security, upward mobility, the white collar, the long summer vacations? What is there—leaving all that minor stuff aside—that attracts people? Well, to a very large extent people come into this as they do in a lot of the other helping professions because they want to play god. In some cases it may be a tyrant, and in some cases it may be a kindly, benevolent god. But they want to play god. This in itself is the source of an awful lot of harm that is done in classrooms. Maybe I'd say: "Drop the god-playing role!"

I never did more harm to myself as a teacher than when I was trying to do the most good. I finally realized that I wasn't going to be able to do very much good and I made my goals much more modest. I stopped thinking of myself as Pygmalion making miraculous statues here out of this putty and began to think of myself more like a gardener—put a little water on these plants, you know, pull up a weed here and there and hope that they're going to grow. It's not really in your hands.

Outlook: You mentioned expectations; I have found that a lot of my students have gone into early childhood education because they realize that, if we're going to make significant changes in the way human beings are, we have to start with the children. That is because of one's expectations of the children one teaches.

Holt: These are almost certain to go along with rather elaborate notions about how children of a particular age should behave. You expect that a child will behave like your unconscious notion of what a good child is, and he will get signals, feedback signals, smiles, happiness, peace. To the extent that children don't behave in that way you are going to be anxious, worried, threatened. A friend of mine once put it very well. He said, "The helping hand strikes again." I'm not knocking the notion of help altogether, but the trouble with me defining myself as the helper, let us say, of you, is that I define you as somebody who can't get along without my help. This is very hard to avoid in schools, and very few teachers do avoid it. They think they're essential whereas at best they might be somewhat useful—but not to everybody. Some of my students found me useful. For them, I wasn't, and I learned, after a while, to stay out of the way of the people who had no need for me and not to have my feelings hurt. But that took a long time.

Outlook: You once said that six-year-olds should have the right to vote. Now you're not serious about that kind of responsibility, are you?

Holt: I'm dead serious. There are people who believe the world is flat, and they vote; there are people who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and they vote; there is Arthur Jensen at Harvard, and he votes; there are people like B.F. Skinner who believe that all human beings are machines, and they vote. There's no piece of madness or folly that disqualifies a person from voting.

I don't think in fact that many six-year-olds would want to vote. I think quite a few ten-year-olds would, and I have known ten-year-olds who knew more about the world at that age than I did when I got out of college. I think that a random cross section of twelve year old people would show that they understood as much about national and world issues as a random sample of, let's say, fifteen year old people. But any case of asking who has the wisdom gets us back where we were in the South with the literacy tests.

Outlook: What do you think is the most important thing that children learn or ought to learn? Some people would say self-confidence; others would say respect. How do you feel?

Holt: It's the wrong kind of question to ask. The things we learn as we grow up can't be divided into things. I think a sense of self-respect is very important in people. I think people who do not value themselves do not value anyone else either, and I think the racism which we touched on earlier and which is such a plague in this country is at least in part a product of people's sense of their own worthlessness. You have to have somebody who seems even more contemptible than you are or you can't live. But if I say that I think confidence or trustfulness or self-respect or flexibility or something is important, I know that there would be a whole lot of people who would isolate it from all the other things with which it's inextricably bound together, and would then rush off and start thinking, "Well, gee, self-respect? How do we teach positive self-concept?" concept?"

That's a great big OK word in schools—textbooks are written about "positive self-concept." Workshops are held, you know. A whole industry has grown up about how do we teach children "positive self-concept." But it's not what we tell people but how we treat them that makes a difference, and if we treat young people as if they were fools and criminals, you know, no "positive self-concept" will come out of that.

Outlook: In his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Thomas Szasz distinguishes between trained education and learned education, and he uses the word education in the broadest sense possible. He says that the job of the psychoanalyst is to show his client metaeducation—to learn how to learn.

Holt: I think that's a very good way of putting it. To make available to people all kinds of experiences from which they should not only learn things but from which they would learn how to learn from experience. This is exactly of course what schools are magnificently fitted not to do, almost by definition. You can't take people out of the world and teach them about the world. The very act of taking them out of the world says: "We don't trust you to learn from the world. We don't trust you to think about what's important or to ask your own questions. I never quite understood McLuhan's "the medium is the message" in the way that he meant it. The medium is the school, the way in which the institution works and the way it treats the people in it is by far the most powerful thing it teaches.

Outlook: We have dealt in a piecemeal fashion on ideas on how you would change the institution of childhood, what different attitudes you'd like to have developed. Would you care to elaborate?

Holt: You see, people sometimes say to me, "Don't you mean you don't think there's any difference between a six-year-old and a 26-year-old?" And I say: "No, there are all sorts of differences." I'm a very different person at 49, which is where I am now, then I was at 39 or 29, and my father who is middle aged is very different from me. Human life is a continuum, of experience, of knowledge, of hope, of energy. If you made a curve of human life, you could shape it. It's probably shaped differently for different people, but eventually at the end it comes down toward senility and declining powers and eventually death. That curve is always a whole. Most people on one part of it are different from another, but we've divided up that curve into two separate boxes. We talk about adult and child as if somebody, three days before his 21st birthday, were like a three-year-old and three days after his 21st birthday was some mysterious thing called an adult. That's what I'm trying to get away from.

Outlook: I remember my personal experiences with grade school, within the context of a parochial school, and it was a very strange experience because in the first grade we were all six years old, and we were told that probably not until some time next year would we be able to read and know the difference between right and wrong.

Holt: That's still better than telling you that you couldn't do it until you were 18. will say that traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, as well as of the Jewish religion, assumed that people were taken as being morally responsible much earlier than contemporary fashion puts it. Some people say you don't really know anything until you get out of graduate school. We're talking about the right you have to be considered as a human being and not some kind of putty to be shaped.

Outlook: I wonder how many people consider human beings as lumps of putty at any age. You know, it's interesting the way we sometimes talk about matters of "public policy." We talk about how we're going to encourage this or that attitude or this or that group. You know, when do we grow up?

Holt: Of course, this is what makes it somewhat difficult to talk about the kinds of things we're talking about or at least difficult to think about ways of getting any of this into practice. We live in a slave society and in a slave age. We yap about freedom all the time. In fact, very few people in their day-to-day lives have any experience of freedom. Not only don't they believe in it; I think they don't even believe it's possible. In fact, I think the reaction of most people in not having it is to try to take it away from those who seem to have it. We live in a society of giant, remote, invisible institutions. Even our academic language, the way we talk, encourages people to believe that the world's made up of all kinds of invisible forces. Academic language is very abstract. The subjects of curves are never he, you, it, or they; it's all something ending with "ion" or "ity" or something. The picture that people get subliminally from all of this is that they're totally dominated by invisible, implacable, unreachable forces and institutions. Indeed, the philosophical fashion of the time, for science, is the universe as a machine; for behaviorism, man is a machine too.

The futureologists write of the future as though it was a train staton and we were coming down toward it along the track and had to speculate on what it might look like when we got to it. But the future is something we make. It doesn't exist until we make it. People are trained to feel that they're helpless in the face of events.

Outlook: Does that make them helpless?

Holt: Perhaps. If you feel helpless, you are indeed helpless. I love Shaw saying that "be sure you get what you like or you will have to like what you get." Well, you aren't going to get all of what you like, but if you don't begin by saying, "I'm going to try to get the things that seem to me important," you aren't going to get any of them.

Outlook: Each of us looks at the world in categories of our own devising. The shoemaker looks at shoes, the tailor at clothes. My own background and interests are not so much educational as economic—particularly free-market economics. So I'd like to ask you one last question relevant to the free market, and that would be: what do you think about child labor legislation?

Holt: I think that the people who first invented these laws meant well. I think that they really did want to protect children, and at that time there might not have been any other way to do it. But today, I don't think child labor laws protect children—in fact, they exploit children.

There are large numbers of young people, all the way down to 10 or 12, who, partly for hard economic reasons—to help out the family—and partly for reasons of self-esteem, desperately need a chance to work and make some money.

You read all the time about the ever-younger gangs of kids who swipe stuff, snatch purses, mug people in the street. Some of them are addicts, but I think a lot of them are young kids who need the money, or want the money, and can't get it any other way. Rich kids get summer jobs; poor kids can't. Rich kids get allowances; poor kids don't. They've no way to get the money but grab it, and they live in a culture that has taught them very effectively that if you don't have some money in your hand, you're nobody, you're dirt. I think a chance to do some work for pay would be enormously helpful to a lot of these people, in a lot of ways.

Outlook: Thank you for your time and your well-presented thoughts. I'm sure our readers will find this very interesting.

Holt: It'll give 'em something to chew on, all right.