Things Haven’t Changed: American Primary Education Over Time

As far as I know, John Holt’s *How Children Fail* is one of the earliest instances of what I like to call “formal educational complaining” in the US: a detailed, written account of failures of the schooling system. It’s flabbergasting how every single depiction seems to strike a chord in the shared experiences of all students, but what truly blows my mind is that it was written in the 1960s. THE 60s. Almost no element of basic elementary school pedagogy has appeared to have significantly evolved since then.

The book is only loosely organized by topic though; consisting of select anecdotes over the course of a few years of Holt’s experience as an educator, primarily in elementary mathematics and literacy. So I tried to compile a list of notes of the most relevant-today and important concepts, sorted by topic and reasoning rather than experiences by chronology.

It feels important to note that this book is almost solely a criticism of teaching strategies, not of the content taught (as a matter of fact, though, neither seem to have significantly changed over the 60 years since the book was published).

I also believe that the forward to this book offers a really great perspective and reflection. So I stole it and put it here.

FOREWORD TO REVISED EDITION: How Children Fail

Young children quickly learn to manipulate teachers.

One of the phenomena Holt is most excited to illustrate is just how often young students maintain full control of a conversation or activity in which the teacher is believed to have complete control. Children end up naturally manipulating the behavior of the teacher to their advantage, which usually translates to easier ways to gain “points” without legitimately learning the subject matter. The best way I can express how this works is by giving some examples:

1. Question bias: The teacher gives a subconscious or conscious clue as to what the actual answer is, and students catch on to the clue much faster than they differentiate the answer itself. Something interesting though, which is not covered, is that slowly removing these clues in a controlled manner can actually help students incrementally develop an understanding.
2. Mental breaks: Holt writes about giving practice reading exercises to a young student who is how learning to pronounce basic words. The student easily pronounced the first few words (”CAT”, “HIT”, “POD”, etc.) but then suddenly responded to a simple word with “stut.” Instead of misinterpreting the task, the student was actually just taking a mental break. After a minute or two of repeating the phrase, the student easily continued with the current word and the rest.
3. The Hand-Raise Trick: A particular student usually doesn’t know the right answer. But somehow, in class activities, she always seems to get away with it. That’s because she uses the Hand-Raise trick. She knows that whenever the teacher asks a question, the teacher will most likely call on the most reserved-looking, inattentive students. So she instead makes eye contact with the teacher and waves her hand enthusiastically. Of course she knows it! The teacher quickly looks past her and calls on someone else.
4. Mumble: When a student is torn between two potential answers to a question, particularly in a language context, the student will mumble or scribble something that seems like it could be either one. Then the teacher will either reward the student for the correct answer, or simply not understand, and react neutrally - responding with the correct answer without knowing what the student truly thought. Holt quotes the game theory concept of minimax, the term for minimizing the highest potential negative outcome for a player’s choice.

There are various other similar strategies that Holt illustrates. In these basic cases teachers begin to lose grasp of not only the actual competence of their students (both overestimating and underestimating their understanding) but also the effectiveness of their own teaching. Holt shows the importance of bearing in mind that young children possess the creative capacities to take the most direct path to a specified, measured outcome—and when the outcome is an artificial reward, then children may easily circumvent the actual content understanding the teacher designed for.

Emotional aversions to learning and gaps in understanding arise from rifts between taught material and students’ intuitive reality.

Was there ever a moment in school where you understood how to generate the correct answer for a question, but you had no idea why or how it worked? Maybe that prescribed method or answer, which you just learned, even seemed to disagree with your intuitive preconception. Worst of all, you never end up understanding the difference. There’s no one I know who hasn’t experienced this, and huge issues start to come up when this happens on a massive scale.

What happens in classrooms is that teachers just don’t have the time to account for making up for each individual lack of understanding in the classroom. So when some new approach, concept, or problem-solving method is introduced, and it happens to disagree with something that students understand or were previously taught, students generally end up with three options:

1. Directly ask the teacher to gain clarity. This is usually the path that’s most likely to lead to a result that’s helpful for both the teacher and the student, but it’s also the rarest, simply because most teachers create a condescending stigma around students correcting them, and/or because students are terrified of saying something that has a remote chance of being incorrect. Students concerned about their grade, left with no other options, may question the teacher simply for the sake of making sure that they properly understand the teacher’s standards, regardless of the accuracy of the content provided. Extremely few will ask plainly for the sake of understanding the content.
2. Independently or collaboratively contemplate which approach is actually correct. While slightly more common than the first, this approach doesn’t happen often enough. Students who are ambivalent about the difference between the new information and their previous understanding, students who are concerned about gaining clarity for the sake of passing the class, and students who are genuinely curious about the subject matter (yet are intimidated by the teacher) might take this approach. But this can be impossible if the teacher restricts side conversations or class discussions.
3. Ignore the dissonance and silently move forward, accepting the new information, with the sole intention of gaining the teacher’s approval. This is the most common path, and unfortunately, the path that almost all students end up gravitating toward. That’s because by this point, students have usually ceased to care about the learning process and are solely concerned about meeting the teacher’s standards. As long as the students can memorize and regurgitate the information that was given, whether or not it was valid, the teacher will reliably grant them a good grade and they will be validated.

It’s essential to transition to a point where students agree that by far the best way to approach this situation is start with #2, and then if the issue is still not resolved, go to #1. But most students unfortunately feel compelled to stick with #3.

Through a continuous cycle of this process, thousands of hours of mandated formal instruction, paired with artificial rewards for learning, lead to students being unmotivated to learn independent of extrinsic motivators.

Early-instilled fears of failure paralyze students in the learning process.

Holt gives the example of a student who found it impossible to improve from rudimentary reading skills despite all efforts the teacher could think of. But when introduced to a book about horses, a field that apparently the student loved, she engaged instantly. The student was held back by the fear that she couldn’t learn to read, he claims.

It is evident that classrooms in which humiliation exists for students, either coming from other students, or even from teachers, quickly become hostile environments.

There’s a fairly straightforward cycle that young children go through when humiliated. Students who don’t initially succeed, or have a hard time catching up with the rest of the class, begin to react to school tasks evasively, attempting to escape the danger of humiliation or uncertainty. Students get into the habit of failing, intentionally or not. They lose self-confidence and are more prone to errors as a result. They also begin to put less and less effort into learning. As their performance worsens, others’ expectations of them, as well as their expectations of themselves, are reduced to the point at which it becomes impossible to disappoint. They not only lose the belief that they can perform a task, they lose the faith that they are even capable of learning to do it.

It’s also worth mentioning that environments in which teachers are afraid of failure can lead to even worse consequences. When teachers are resistant to feedback, reject clarifying or tangential questions, and attempt to defend themselves when their errors are corrected, the human inaccuracies that are inevitable will go unresolved, students will interpret their environments as hostile, and students will be discouraged from reasoning for themselves.

Definitions and methods of evaluation must be precise, accurate, and consistent.

Most teachers unfortunately find it very, very difficult to define concepts and assessment criteria precisely. Common examples of teachers failing to adhere to this standard, just in the case of definitions, include:

• Defining actual concepts in instruction incorrectly or inconsistently.
• Using grammatically incorrect (and thus ambiguous) language to deliver instructional content
• Reciting generalized rules which contain obvious exceptions that aren’t mentioned (E.g. “no words end with c!”, “every vowel in a word corresponds to exactly one syllable!”, “all punctuation ALWAYS goes WITHIN quotations!”, “Always use a comma before a quotation in a sentence!”, “A verb is any word of action!”).

As far as definitions goes, it’s pretty easy to see the basic issue here. If students are taught things that are contradictory, they will not be able to learn correct information. But what makes this even more important is another concept that Holt brings up: Young students seeking to understand will internalize a given definition many times more deeply than the teacher who gave the definition. An incorrect or imprecise definition carries much less weight to a teacher than it does to students. There are a few psychological reasons this may be true:

• There are more students than teachers in the classroom. Thus, no matter what, an incorrect definition has a multiplying detrimental effect.
• Students know less overall information (i.e. crystallized intelligence) upon which to be able to quickly refute or accept an idea. Because students are just building their foundational understanding of reality, the teacher’s definition means relatively more to them than it does to the teacher, who already has a thorough understanding of the concept.
• Students may carry more responsibility than the teacher for their performance. Students are “graded” and evaluated incrementally based on what they understand, but teachers are not evaluated on any kind of regular basis. Students literally are rewarded for good performance and punished for poor performance. But teachers are hardly held accountable for their own performance.
• The mere fact that the students are new to the concept forces them to attempt to absorb the concept more than it is thought about by the teacher—who perhaps has not only thoroughly learned it, but has also taught it many times.
• In young students, this phenomenon is only exacerbated. Research suggests that younger students have a significantly stronger ability to absorb concepts; thus when the same idea is presented to an adult and a child, the child will naturally internalize it more deeply.

No matter what, there’s this constant effect where a small-seeming teaching mistake leads to much worse consequences than anticipated.

As for common failures in evaluation, I also listed some common examples, based on the book, and their unintended negative consequences:

• Establishing subjective and qualitatively focused methods of evaluation, with little feedback or indication of how to improve a score.
• Using inconsistent approaches to realistic situations for which there either is or isn’t a consistent policy, e.g: sometimes a teacher will grant credit for late work, and sometimes they wont; only occasionally will a teacher grant the opportunity to gain credit for missed classes; teachers blatantly adapt their policies based on how they feel about a specific student.
• Using grammatically incorrect language to define assignments or establish evaluative criteria.
• Failing to recognize the natural variation in young students’ performance and address uncontrolled external variables.

The effects of students’ natural cognitive tendencies are often mistaken for lack of content understanding. Exhausted concentration, boredom, and approaching a problem incorrectly because the way it is presented is misleading are all ways in which a proficient student can “underperform” in assessment.

However, taking this a step further: Even when students aren’t yet proficient, ignorance, boredom, and conscious resistance are mistaken for intellectual inadequacy. These conflations between ignorance and intellectual inferiority, in particular, strongly discourage students of all levels. I will reiterate the message that is almost impossible for young children to learn when they don’t want to learn, but they absorb huge amounts of knowledge when they’re fascinated and curious about something. If a teacher doesn’t believe a student is capable of learning a topic, the student rarely has a chance.

Rote question-and-answer forms of study lead to unsustainable reasoning habits.

John Holt illustrates how failures to grasp concepts, and slow paced learning, often results from the more inefficient one of two specific, learned methods of problem solving:

Method 1: Answer-Focused

In answer-focused problem solving, the student immediately begins searching for the proper answer to a given question. Students have been taught to understand that questions generally have a single precise answer within some broad range of possibilities. They may also believe that there is a unique, prescribed way to arrive at an answer whose inner workings are irrelevant but whose method is infallible. If students are unsure of a prescribed method, they will extrapolate answer possibilities based upon patterns they’ve sensed in previous problems, and perhaps attempt to “check” their answer by finding some arbitrary or incomplete rationale before delivering it. When there isn’t enough information given to solve a problem, students will give some answer which is in their range of possibilities, even when it is not backed by sound reasoning.

Method 2: Problem-Focused

Problem-focused students will respond to a question by first seeking to situate themselves within the conceptual context of the problem. They will consider multiple procedures for determining the answer, which may build off of concepts they previously learned, and may also rely on their own combination of multiple problem-solving strategies. Students will seek to have a complete understanding of the question presented and then logically derive reasoning based on the given information. When there isn’t enough information given to solve a problem, students will pivot to another approach to problem solving or analyze whether the question itself is valid. Students will recognize the limits of their own understanding, and while they might seek to build out their problem solving capabilities through their own reasoning, they will not provide an answer for which there could be invalid reasoning.

There are a few interesting realizations we can derive from thinking about this. Method 1 is the trap that teachers fall into when they use rote methods. Interestingly, it is also the most effective way to take multiple-choice standardized tests. Method 2 is the way that problems are solved in the actual world, and how students can develop resilience to resolve issues that they encounter on their own. This method is what we need to strive toward.

To briefly illustrate how this works, I’ll give a few reasons and examples that I believe encapsulate how these things happen and ways they can be resolved.

Students use method 1 when they’re taught to memorize content and methods rather than derive them for themselves and understand the reasoning behind them. Additionally, when students spend large amounts of time answering multiple-choice and/or single-correct-answer questions, they begin to focus more on “producing” the correct answer rather than “thinking” about the conceptual situation of the problem (”producers” & “thinkers” used from Holt’s commentary).

“Thinkers,” or Method 2, adherents, are able to reason from scratch. They know that questions can sometimes be invalid, and will give feedback to teachers accordingly. They also eagerly recognize the boundaries of their own knowledge, and determine precisely what they need to expand those boundaries. Their responses to any question (not accounting for inadvertent errors) will be either the correct answer, or “I don’t know, because I would need _____ to be able to solve the problem.” Because of the global understanding they seek, they will be able to solve a broad range of complex problems independently.

There are various analogies you can use to describe this distinction, but one that I feel makes sense is cooking. When teaching people to cook, if you simply force them to memorize the ingredient amounts and sequence of actions, they will only be able to cook one dish, and will probably forget the process quickly. Moreover, these people will grow to generalize that additional solutions to problems will be prescribed to them and only require memorization. But if instead you tell them the ingredients’ relationship with each other and unique value to the dish, and the conceptual reasons for the specific ingredient amounts, then, chances are, not only will they remember how to cook the meal for longer, but they might even be able to figure out how to cook other meals given the properties of the ingredients—and create their own recipes. Perhaps most importantly, they will be more engaged in the learning process.

• A little psychology tangent

  There are actual modern psychological concepts that are loosely related to this distinction. “Bottom-up processing” is the category of sensory processing that does not rely on previous assumptions or intuition; “top-down processing” relies on prior experiences, assumptions, or expectations, to interpret incoming information. We could similarly say that “bottom-up learning” is where a student understands the nature of the very fundamental aspects of a concepts, and every other concept is logically derived from or built off of those fundamental concepts, whereas “top-down learning” is the much more fallible kind of learning that’s based on intuition and incomplete foundations. When teaching students how to reason for themselves, taking a top-down approach can reflect Method 1: reasoning is based on memorizing the upper levels of a concept rather than fully understanding it from a base level; and the bottom-up approach can reflect Method 2.

  It is very important to note, though, that different interpretations of “top-down” and “bottom-up” learning in different contexts can mean completely different things. There’s a fascinating, and very valid, point illustrated in this article that emphasizes the value of learners discovering concepts for themselves in a sort of “top-down” manner with respect to Bloom’s Taxonomy:

  Bloom's Taxonomy: Bottom-Up or Top-Down? | Resilient Educator

A relevant excerpt that comments on the ineffectiveness of rote learning, despite how pervasive it is:

“…the notion that if a child repeats a meaningless statement or process enough times it will become meaningful is as absurd as the notion that if a parrot imitates human speech long enough it will know what it is talking about. This very intelligent boy has been drilled many times in the multiplication tables and the approved method of division, and he is worse off now than the first day he heard them. They make no more sense to him than they ever aid, and they scare him a lot more. But if he does these operations enough times with rods [a physical learning tool Holt used], or other materials, so that he can begin to do them in his head without rods, if he can get to the point where he does not have to distribute every last white rod before figuring his answer, we may be able to translate some of these operations into symbols that make some sense to him.”

Furthermore, one of Holt’s biggest points is how the issue of Method 1 reasoning actually compounds over the years of students’ primary education, stifling their reasoning capabilities over extended spans of time. A fun line:

“We don’t have to make human beings smart*.* They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.”

Learning strategies that students have previously developed, particularly in quantitative reasoning, significantly impact the way that these students learn going forward. It can actually prevent them from understanding certain concepts in the ways that they’re used to. There’s a specific process in which this happens. First, the student doesn’t understand content presented, because both the student doesn’t understand the content that consist the foundations for the new content, and because the student conceptualizes the content in an extremely inefficient way. But even further, no matter how many times the content is repeated or strategies are rehearsed, the student will not have a strong foundational understanding.

It’s extremely difficult to dismantle harmful problem solving tactics in students who don’t know how to think for themselves, i.e. who expect methods to be given to them and aren’t taught to make sure that these reasoning strategies fit in their scheme of reality.

Teachers fool themselves into overlooking students’ shortcomings.

Teachers have a very hard time accurately assessing students’ proficiencies. Unfortunately, this is a type of issue that can only be alleviated asymptotically, since teachers can’t get into students’ heads. There is no way to determine, with perfect accuracy, how much a student knows or understands. But something that can be concretely understood is the various specific methods that lead teachers to incorrectly evaluate students.

The Blanket Effect: Open discussion or participation activities can show advanced students’ mastery while masking many students’ lack of knowledge. Students who don’t know the answer may quickly echo the opinions of the most prominent voices in the class. Teachers who only call on students who raise their hand may generalize the knowledge of the most advanced students.

Self-serving bias: Data has shown that teachers often trick themselves by crediting themselves for improvements and blaming students for lack of development in the classroom environment. This is simply the natural psychological self-serving bias in perception: people will choose to view positive results in a way that favors their impact and view negative results in a way that credits external factors.

Cultural biases, and the influence of expectations: A famous study in 1968 demonstrated that students will perform significantly better when their teachers are told that the students are particularly intellectually capable (”the Pygmalion effect”). Holt hints that this is likely to play a role in why minorities may appear underperform in a classroom, as well as overall teachers making unsubstantiated inferiority generalizations about any student.

Leading questions: Even asking leading questions, which let students develop their own reasoning for a problem, can be ineffective in some specific situations when teaching problem solving. When students solve a problem, the goal should be for them to ask questions when they’re unsure how to proceed. When they come to rely on a teacher or tutor asking questions at every point in a problem, they lack the capacity to navigate through ambiguity on their own.

A mutual understanding of students’ realm of competence is critical.

This leads directly to the core point that it’s impossible to learn if you OR the teacher doesn’t know the difference between what you don’t know and what you do know. The student’s understanding of this difference comes from adherence to “Method 2,” or being a problem-focused problem solver, as well as an extremely low amount of fear and humiliation associated with lack of concept understanding. The teacher’s understanding of this difference comes directly from assessment, which is why methods of evaluation, also as described above, must be accurate and consistent.

Some of My Favorite Entries:

• June 20, 1960: On the paradox of adequately evaluating children's understanding on concepts.
• October 1, 1959: A particular instance of Gattegno successfully making a substantial intellectual leap with an extremely slow child. Comments on both pedagogical theory and attitudes toward children of different levels.
• April 27, 1960: On how evaluations (tests, quizzes, exams, assessments, etc) usually fail severely and “teaching to the test” prevents overarching understanding of the subject matter, which both rewards students who are less inquisitive and simply have strong study habits, and punishes students who legitimately seek to gain a foundational understanding of a subject
• December 4, 1960: On how specific teaching strategies cause kids to be “stupid” because of how they induce fear, anxiety, resistance, boredom, and flight behavior. They literally extinguish the natural curiosity of children. It’s way more efficient to teach by actually running more activities that children enjoy than to force them to endure activities that they’re uninterested in. The following excerpt captures the message pretty well:

What I disagree with:

• There are multiple parts of the book where he blatantly conflates the biological phenomenon of diminishing neuroplasticity with the harmful effects of schooling.
• While there are a lot of now-established psychological concepts that he accurately conveys, but also many concepts that are speculative and questionable.
• While most of his reasoning is intuitively valid, it’s super disorganized and pretty much all evidence is anecdotal. His reasoning is almost solely backed up by his stories, the stories of his friends, and “this seems to make sense, right?” as opposed to statistical information.
• He also doesn’t cover the concept of exceptional students becoming particularly susceptible to authoritarian discouragement when they try to speak up in class or exceed expectations subversively. It’s probably because that was something that he was sensitive to in his own classes—he consciously made sure not to enforce any sort of authoritarian policy.
• He unfortunately exaggerates a lot of concepts that are particularly valuable, which makes the respective arguments a little less valid: things like “This is the only kind of educational research that will ever actually improve education--research done by teachers, in their own classrooms, to solve what they see as their own problems.”
• He also doesn’t include the idea of students being limited by the mental scheme of success in school (i.e. the best possible set of actions a student could take) running parallel to scoring well on exams and rigorous classes—which, in reality, only reflect a capacity for diligence, memorization, and obedience. Way too many students are robbed by their potential because of the fact that these spectra are not parallel in reality.

Last Thoughts

Damn. This is one of the only books I’ve ever read that both fills my heart with hope and pride (that there’s some awareness of these problems that’s broader than I thought) yet makes me want to bang my head against a wall (because of the problems, and because of how this is a non-outdated critique of outdated teaching from 60 years ago). It would be an understatement to say Holt’s insights were far ahead of his time.

Perhaps the book should be called “How Teachers Fail.” Because every single one of the educational shortcomings John Holt recounts is due to an error on the part of the instructor. It’s remarkable how low the bar is for primary schoolteachers. But perhaps even more remarkable is how difficult it is to raise that bar on a wide scale.