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NOTE John Holt: Libertarian Outsider

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brigenbach.

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Some of the most interesting figures in the libertarian tradition are the people I call the outsiders.

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The outsiders are generally independent intellectuals and writers who are obsessed with one particular social or political issue.

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The outsiders come at their single issues the way certain dogs come at certain bones.

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They chew them and worry them and gnaw on them and work at them incessantly, determined to understand them from the ground up.

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And once they do, once they've realized their goal, they find that they have reasoned themselves into a version of libertarianism.

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Some of them recognize that this is what has happened to them. Others remain clueless.

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But either way, outsiders remain outsiders. Even if they do realize what they've reasoned

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their way into, and even if they don't mind that realization, still, they don't join up

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and become conscious movement libertarians. They just go on about their intellectual business,

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providing movement libertarians with invaluable ammunition against their opponents on that

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not one particular issue in which they specialized. Sometimes they provide movement libertarians

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with valuable insights of a more general kind. And, of course, in the process of doing all

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this they open and hold open what amounts to a new and different door into libertarianism.

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John Holt, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow, was such a figure. Holt died long ago, of

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of course, back in 1985. Had he lived, he'd be 87 years old. Like all the outsiders, he's

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an object lesson in the many ways there are to reach libertarianism, and how you can never

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be sure what path is going to work for any given individual. Holt, in effect, reasoned

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his way to libertarianism from his relentless, dogged analysis of what worked and didn't

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and Work in Education in the Schoolroom.

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And there is irony in this, because Holt was a relative late-comer to the schoolroom.

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He didn't become a teacher in his early twenties right out of college, as many, perhaps most

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teachers do.

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He was thirty years old before he ever took a teaching job, and he took it then mostly

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as a favor to his sister.

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Wilt had been born in New York on April 14, 1923, with the proverbial silver spoon in

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his mouth, the oldest of three children in an extremely prosperous family.

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He attended expensive and exclusive private schools in Switzerland and New England, and

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then enrolled in Yale University.

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When he graduated in 1943 with a degree in engineering, a subject that no longer interested

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World War II was on, and able-bodied young men were expected to go off to war.

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So, Holt enlisted in the Navy and served in the Pacific Theater of the War as a member of the crew of a U.S. submarine.

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He was appalled by U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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He thought about Truman's decision long and hard, and about his own reaction to it,

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and he decided that the deployment of nuclear weapons in warfare was the

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greatest threat to the future of Western civilization and that the best way of

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preventing the destruction of Western civilization by nuclear weapons was to

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work for the establishment of a single world government. When he was mustered

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out of the Navy in 1946 he took a job with the New York based American

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and Movement for World Government. Late the following year, 1947, he signed on with the

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newly founded United World Federalists, an organization that still exists. It's now called

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the World Federalist Institute. He stayed there, working for world government and world

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peace for the next six years. He was, you might say, one of those one-worlders, the

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The crude Neanderthal knuckle-dragging right-wingers of the 1950s and early 1960s used to warn

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us against.

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But after six years, Holt gave up on that cause.

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He no longer believed its goals were achievable, so he walked away.

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It was 1953.

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He was 30 years old, a man with an expensive college degree and little experience doing

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Out in Colorado, his younger sister had partly personal reasons for suggesting that he consider

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filling an opening she happened to know existed in the faculty roster of an expensive nearby

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private school.

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And so, in the fall of 1953, John Holt walked into a fifth-grade classroom and sat down

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for the first time behind the teacher's desk. After a few years in Colorado, he moved on

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to California and from there to Boston, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

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Holt found it much more interesting being a fifth-grade teacher than he'd ever really

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imagined. Like the early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent time in the

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1920s when he himself was in his 30s teaching kindergarten children, Holt found it fascinating

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to Observe the Minds of Children, Grasping or Failing to Grasp Ideas, Developing or Failing

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to Develop Intellectual Skills. Like Wittgenstein, he found it fascinating to speculate about

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the implications of his observations for any realistic theory of how the human mind works.

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And after eleven years in the classroom, Holt decided to set down his observations for others

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to Read. He wrote a book, published in 1964, called How Children Fail. This first book

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wasn't in any significant way libertarian, though relatively little in it was incompatible

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with the libertarian way of looking at things, and it was certainly encouraging to libertarian

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readers that one of Holt's central themes was the importance of treating every individual

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Child as an Individual with Appropriate Respect.

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To live well with other human beings, adults or children, is a subtle art, Holt wrote.

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Rules for doing it are not much help.

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But if I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this.

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Be very wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult,

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whose good opinion and affection you valued. Mind your own business is not a bad minor

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rule in human affairs.

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This passage was not part of Holt's first book. It was written eight years later, after

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his first four books, How Children Fail, How Children Learn, The Underachieving School

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and What Do I Do Monday, had propelled him to the forefront of the school reform movement

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of the 1960s. Holt's ideas seemed to many people at the time to be similar to the views

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of such other education critics of the 60s as Ivan Illich, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, and

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Paul Goodman. Like them, he began touring the country, lecturing. Meanwhile, his thinking

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continued to evolve in a libertarian direction. In 1972, when he wrote his fifth book, Freedom

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Freedom and Beyond, from which I quoted a few moments ago, he hadn't yet made it all

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the way. Certain chapters don't come across as particularly libertarian at all. They show

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that for all the acuity with which John Holt had begun to analyze the larger implications

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of the issues he had encountered in the classroom, he had not yet begun to challenge many conventional

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ideas. Freedom and Beyond was a transitional book, which shows Holt still in the process

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of Reasoning His Way from School Reformism to Libertarianism.

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Holt reports in Freedom and Beyond, for example, that in the late 1960s and early 1970s he

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had talked to and with hundreds of groups of people at meetings large and small, almost

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all in schools or colleges, and supposedly about education.

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But more often than not, and particularly if we had time to get deeply into the subject,

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we found ourselves talking not about education, but about such things as human nature, the

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meaning of life, the relations between children and adults, or American society.

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It has become hard to talk seriously about schools anymore, even with people who work

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on or in them without finding soon that the subject of the talk has somehow moved outside

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the school building.

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Holt had discovered through these wide-ranging discussions that what he himself had begun

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to want to understand was something a bit bigger than what could be contained in the

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school building.

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He had begun to realize that what he wanted to understand was, in his words, how people

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People of varying ages and skills may live together and be useful to each other without

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some of them always pushing the others around.

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What Holt wanted, in a nutshell, was freedom for those being pushed around, freedom from

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interference by others.

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But, he wrote in Freedom and Beyond, few of us really believe in freedom.

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As a slogan, it is fine, but we don't understand it as a process or mechanism with which or

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are within which people can work and live.

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We have had in our own lives so little experience of freedom, except in the most trivial situations,

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that we can hardly imagine how it might work, how we might use it, or how it could possibly

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be of any use to us when any serious work was to be done.

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As an example, Holt cites the controversy then raging in educational circles between

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and Advocates of the Structured Classroom and Advocates of the Unstructured Classroom.

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He writes,

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There are no such things as unstructured situations.

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They are not possible.

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Every human situation, however casual and unforced, has a structure.

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Moreover, he continues, all of us live all the time within structures.

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These exist in their turn within other structures within still larger structures, like Chinese

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boxes. On the other hand, there are, Holt writes, two different kinds of structure in

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human society. There's the structure of the traditional classroom, in which, though the

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children may be all different, their differences do not make any difference. They all have

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have the same things to do, and they are all expected to do them in the same way. Like

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factory workers on the assembly line, or soldiers in the army, they are interchangeable and

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quite often expendable. This sort of structure, Holt points out, is inflexible, rigid and

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static. It is also arbitrary and external. It does not grow out of, and has nothing to

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to do with the life and needs of the class what the children want, what the teacher has

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to give. It is dropped on them from above, like a great glass box.

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By contrast, Holt continues, the structure of the open class is organic, internal. It

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grows out of the needs and abilities of the children and teachers themselves. They create

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this order, and because they create it, the order works. By that I don't mean that it

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looks neat and pretty, it often does not. I mean that it helps people to get things

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done, helps them to live, work and grow. It does not squelch life, it enhances it.

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You might say that Holt had reasoned his way into a version of Friedrich Hayek's famous

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Holt's insight about spontaneous order in human society and its superiority to order imposed

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on people from above by those in power. But he found that most parents, teachers and school

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officials were less concerned with the possible benefits of freedom than they were with what

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they considered the obvious benefits of what they called discipline.

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But Holt wondered. When people talk about their child learning discipline, he wrote

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in Freedom and Beyond, what is it that they really want him to learn? Probably most or

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all of the following. 1. Do what you're told without questioning or resisting whenever

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I or any other authority tells you to do something. 2. Go on doing what you're told for as long

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3. DO WHATEVER WE WANT YOU TO DO, WILLINGLY. DO IT WITHOUT EVEN HAVING TO BE TOLD. DO WHAT

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YOU'RE EXPECTED TO DO. 4. IF YOU DON'T DO THESE THINGS, YOU WILL BE PUNISHED, AND YOU

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WILL DESERVE TO BE. 5. ACCEPT YOUR LIFE WITHOUT COMPLAINING EVEN

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Even if you get very little, if any, of what you think you want, even if your life has

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not much joy, meaning or satisfaction, that's what life is.

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6.

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Take your medicine, your punishment, whatever the people above you do to you, without complaining

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or resisting.

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7.

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Living this way is good for your soul and character.

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Holt conceded that some people who worry about discipline may not necessarily want their

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children to believe all the ideas listed above, but most of the Americans who said in a recent

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nationwide poll that what they wanted above all else in schools was more discipline probably

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had all these ideas in mind.

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Holt also met plenty of people on his lecture tours who favored discipline in this sense.

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Not long ago, he wrote, after an evening meeting in a town of about 15,000 people, a man came

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up to me and said, I run a bank here, and what I want to know is, if kids get the kind

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of education you're talking about, what are they going to do when I tell them that if

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they want to work in my bank, they are going to have to get their hair cut and wear a suit

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and show up promptly at 8.30 in the morning?

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I said, well, I suppose if a young person really wants to work in your bank, he will

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accept those conditions as part of the deal. He walked away looking dissatisfied. What

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I might have said to him, but didn't, was that if willingness to obey his orders was

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all he was looking for in his employees, he would probably not be in the banking business

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for long.

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One thing Holt had definitely decided by the time he wrote Freedom and Beyond in 1972

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was that the fact that we have an institution or condition, be it schools, jails, poverty,

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cancer or war, ought not to bar us from asking ourselves, should we have it? Do we want to

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have it? If not, how might we get rid of it? And what else might we have in its place?

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By the time I met Holt, it was in Boston in the late summer of 1978, I was interviewing

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him for a monthly magazine called the Libertarian Review. He had decided to apply this thinking

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to schools themselves. I was a school teacher for quite a number of years, he told me, and

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then for a number of years I was a would-be school reformer. What I do now mostly is edit

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and publish a little magazine called Growing Without Schooling, which is written for, and

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to a large extent by people who either have taken their children out of schools altogether

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or are trying to find ways to do so.

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The reason I do this is that I've come to believe that learning, the activity of finding

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out about the world and the people in it, is not something that has to happen inside

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a school.

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In fact, most schools are not very good places for it.

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I also don't believe any longer that in order to have learning, you have to have teaching.

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I think most people, beginning from birth, are extraordinarily capable learners, and

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all they need is questions answered once in a while, and roadmaps.

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If they get curious about a particular question, they may need somebody to say, well, here's

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a book about that, or here's a magazine.

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I think that what children need is access to more of the world, and in particular to

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more adults whose work is not dealing with children.

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Holt had started his little magazine, Growing Without Schooling, the year before, in 1977.

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By 1981, when he wrote his book, Teach Your Own, he was well on his way to becoming the

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de facto leader of the new homeschooling movement.

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Four years later, in 1985, long before that movement had become anything like as widespread

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and influential as it is today, Holt was dead.

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One of the reasons Holt gave up on school reform in his later years was that he came

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to understand some fundamental truths about the school system.

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Our schools, he wrote in 1972 in Freedom and Beyond, are the way they are for many reasons

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What are they for, then?

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Well, Holt wrote, society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where,

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for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut

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up and so got out of everyone else's way. Mom doesn't want them hanging around the house,

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the citizens do not want them out in the streets, and workers do not want them in the labor

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force. What then do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? We put them in schools.

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That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

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And by 1978, when I met him, Holt had become firmly convinced that kids did not deserve

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to be sent to jail.

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He was a small-L libertarian, he told me, meaning a libertarian who wasn't a member

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or partisan of the Libertarian Party.

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We were both in the Copley Plaza Hotel that Labor Day weekend to attend a National Libertarian

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Party convention where Holt was an invited speaker.

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His name was well known to libertarians back then, and he knew it.

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He realized full well what he'd reasoned his way into in his efforts to understand the

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issues that had first presented themselves to him in a series of classrooms.

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He even took the libertarian name, but with reservations.

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He was friendly, but he remained a part, aloof, an outsider.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.