Excerpt from "How Children Fail", by John Holt

February 11, 1959

Someone asked the other day, "Why do we go to school?" Pat, with vigor unusual in her, said, "So when we grow up we won't be stupid." These children equate stupidity with ignorance. Is this what they mean when they call themselves stupid? Is this one of the reasons why they are so ashamed of not knowing something? If so, have we, perhaps unknowingly, taught them to feel this way? We should clear up this distinction, show them that it is possible to know very few facts, but make very good use of them. Conversely, one can know many facts and still act stupidly. The learned fool is by no means rare in this country.

Since then I have heard many children, most of them "bright" children in "good" schools, call themselves stupid. By this they mean ignorant--but they also mean unintelligent and beyond that generally worthless, untrustworthy, sure to do the wrong thing. Why did these children believe this of themselves? Because generally adults treated them as if it were so.

At this school children were not allowed to be waiters at lunch tables until fifth grade. The adults who ran the school--many of them psychologists--felt that until children were ten they could not be trusted to carry dishes of food around a room without dropping them, or maybe even throwing them. When children went from one class or building to another, they had to be guided by an adult, in carefully straight lines--one child was always appointed line leader, to help the teacher do this. Without some such system,everyone assumed, the children would never get to where they were going.

As fond of the children as we were, Bill and I shared enough of these prejudices so that when, a few years later, we saw in public schools in Leicestershire, England, six-year-olds carrying dishes of food from kitchen counters to lunch tables, or going from classrooms to assemblies and back again without adult supervision, we were absolutely astonished. When we came home and told people of these marvels, they said, "Well, English kids must be different, you could never get American kids to do that."

It never occurred to any of us that these contemptuous assumptions might be a cause of many of the children's learning problems. To learn much about the world, we must trust it, must believe that it is generally consistent and makes sense. Even more, we must trust ourselves to make sense of it. The world we presented to these children through their schoolwork was a meaningless fragmented world, the parts of it separated from each other, and all of them cut off from any of the children's real experience. And in all the ways in which we dealt with them, we taught them to distrust themselves. Small wonder they used the strategies they did.

As by now many have pointed out, the bad things we assume about other people tend to become true, become "self-fulfilling prophecies." Many people seem to think that the way to take care of children is to ask in any situation what is the most stupid and dangerous thing the children could possibly do, and then act as if they were sure to do it. One warm April morning I sat playing my cello at the edge of the swan boat pond in the Boston Public Garden. At its edge, the pond is perhaps a foot deep, maybe less. Around it is a broad granite curbing. During the hour and a half I was there, four mothers came by, each with a small child in tow. The youngest of these was about a year and a half old, the oldest close to three. Each of these four children was interested in the water and wanted to go look at it. Each of these four mothers assumed that if the child got anywhere near the water's edge he or she would fall in. They did not shout at their children or threaten them, but each mother rushed about trying to stand between the child and the water, or trying to distract him from the water, or turn him in another direction. Naturally, the more they tried to keep the children away from the water, the more the children struggled to see it, despite the mothers' evermore frantic cries of "No, no, you'll fall in, you'll fall in!"

But all these children were good steady walkers, well past the tottering and falling stage. The odds against their falling into the water, if they had not been harassed and rushed into carelessness and recklessness, would have been, for the youngest child over a hundred to one, and for the older children a million to one.

If these mothers are "careful" this way long enough, they are very likely to get just the behavior they don't want. Little children are indeed very careful at first--watch them on a stair or some steps, deciding whether to step down forwards or crawl down backwards. They are eager to try new things, but at the same time they have a remarkably accurate sense of what they can and cannot do, and as they grow older, their judgment about this improves. But these fussed-over children are almost certain to become either too timid to try anything or too reckless and careless to know what they can try and what they should leave alone.

To prove they are not afraid, they will try to do things that no sensible and careful child would do, and then, having put themselves it danger, they will not be confident and cool enough to get themselves out. Years ago I visited an adventure playground in Holland Park in London. The playground was full of trees to climb, ropes to swing on, and other "dangerous" stuff. I asked the young people in charge whether many children got hurt there. They said, "No, not since we told the adults that they couldn't come in." When the mothers *could* come in, they were constantly saying "Don't do this, don't do that, it's too dangerous." The children would be so angry and humiliated by this kind of talk that in a spirit of "I'll show you" they would rush to climb a too tall tree or use a too difficult piece of apparatus. Once in danger, with their mothers' "You'll fall, you'll fall" in their ears, they would soon get rattled, and down they would come with a crash. So the people in charge of the playground built a little waiting area where mothers could sit and talk *but could not see their children* while the children used the playground. Since then, they told me, their most serious injury had been one mildly sprained ankle. Left alone, children made very prudent choices about what kind of risks they would run--for being adventurous, of course they wanted to run some risks. At the same time, they learned how to be cool and collected in risky situations.