How Children Fail

By John Holt, Penguin Education

Foreword

Most children in school fail.

For a great many, this failure is avowed and absolute. Close to forty percent
of those who begin high school, drop out before they finish. For college, the
figure is one in three.

Many others fail in fact if not in name. They complete their schooling only
because we have agreed to push them up through the grades and out of the
schools, whether they know anything or not. There are many more such
children than we think. If we "raise our standards" much higher, as some
would have us do, we will find out very soon just how many there are. Our
classrooms will bulge with kids who can't pass the test to get into the next
class.

But there is a more important sense in which almost all children fail: Except
for a handful, who may or may not be good students, they fail to develop
more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding,
and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use
during, the first two or three years of their lives.

Why do they fail?

They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.

They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the
many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations
for them hang over their heads like a cloud.

They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are
so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide
spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents.
They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them
in school makes little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they
have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know—
to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds.

How does this mass failure take place? What really goes on in the
classroom? What are these children who fail doing? What goes on in their
heads? Why don't they make use of more of their capacity?

This book is the rough and partial record of a search for answers to these
questions. It began as a series of memos written in the evenings to my
colleague and friend Bill Hull, whose fifth-grade class I observed and taught
in during the day. Later these memos were sent to other interested teachers
and parents. A small number of these memos make up this book. They have
not been much rewritten, but they have been edited and rearranged under
four major topics: Strategy; Fear and Failure; Real Learning; and How
Schools Fail. Strategy deals with the ways in which children try to meet, or
dodge, the demands that adults make of them in school. Fear and Failure
deals with the interaction in children of fear and failure, and the effect of this
on strategy and learning. Real Learning deals with the difference between
what children appear to know or are expected to know, and what they really
know. How Schools Fail analyzes the ways in which schools foster bad
strategies, raise children's fears, produce learning which is usually
fragmentary, distorted, and short-lived, and generally fail to meet the real
needs of children.

These four topics are clearly not exclusive. They tend to overlap and blend
into each other. They are, at most, different ways of looking at and thinking
about the thinking and behavior of children.

It must be made clear that the book is not about unusually bad schools or
backward children. The schools in which the experiences described here
took place are private schools of the highest standards and reputation. With
very few exceptions, the children whose work is described are well above
the average in intelligence and are, to all outward appearances, successful,
and on their way to "good" secondary schools and colleges. Friends and
colleagues, who understand what I am trying to say about the harmful effect
of today's schooling on the character and intellect of children, and who have
visited many more schools than I have, tell me that the schools I have not
seen are not a bit better than those I have, and very often are worse.

FOREWORD TO REVISED EDITION

After this book came out, people used to say to me, "When are you going to
write a book about how teachers fail?" My answer was, "But that's what this
book is about."

But if it is a book about a teacher who often failed, it is also about a teacher
who was not satisfied to fail, not resigned to failure. It was my job and my
chosen task to help children learn things, and if they did not learn what I
taught them, it was my job and task to try other ways of teaching them until I
found ways that worked.

For many years now I've been urging and begging teachers and student
teachers to take this attitude toward their work. Most respond by saying,
"Why are you blaming us for everything that goes wrong in schools? Why
are you trying to make us feel all this guilt?"

But I'm not. I didn't blame myself or feel guilt, just because my students
were so often not learning what I was teaching, because I wasn’t doing what
I had set out to do and couldn't find out how to do it. But I did hold myself
responsible.

"Blame" and "guilt" are crybaby words. Let's get them out of our talk about
education. Let's use instead the word "responsible." Let's have schools and
teachers begin to hold themselves responsible for the results of what they do.

I held myself responsible. If my students weren't learning what J was

teaching, it was my job to find out why. How Children Fail, as I said, was a
partial record of my not very successful attempts to find out why. Now,
twenty years after I wrote most of How Children Fail, I think I know much
more about why. That’s what this revised version of the book is about.

I've decided to leave the original exactly as I wrote it, and where I have
second thoughts about what I then wrote, I’ve put those to. It may seem to
some that it took me too long to learn what I have learned, and that I made
many foolish mistakes, and missed many obvious clues. I feel no guilt about
this. I was trying as best I could to discover something difficult and
important, and I suspect there was no path to it much quicker or shorter than
the one I took. In this book you can see where I began, some of my twistings
and turnings, and where I am today.

There is now a lot of talk about raising our standards higher, about "making
sure" that children know what they are "supposed to know" before allowing
them into the next grade. What will this lead to in practice? Mostly, to a lot
more of the fakery I talk about in this book— i.e., giving children intensive
coaching just before the tests so that they will appear to know what in fact
they do not know at all. Also to a highly selective enforcement of these
rules—we can expect to see many more poor and/or non-white children held
back than affluent whites. Finally, we will find out once more what by now
we should have learned: that many or most children repeating a grade do no
better the second time through than they did the first, if even as well. Why
should they? If a certain kind of teaching failed to produce learning the first
time, why will it suddenly produce it the second time? In many cases the
children, now ashamed and angry as well as bored and confused, will do
even worse than before—and will probably disrupt the class as well.

In other words, this brave crusade against the evil of "social promotion" is
not likely to last long or produce many positive results.

Recently, at a meeting of the Education Writers Association, in New York, I

heard Dr. Ronald Edmonds, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
talk about some important research he had done at the request of the New
York City public schools. He and his colleagues tried to find out what makes
some schools “effective," by which they meant a school in which the
percentage of poor children who learn a satisfactory amount of what they are
supposed to learn in any grade, enough to be legitimately promoted, is the
same as the proportion of middle-class or affluent children.

The first thing worth noting is that in the entire northeastern section of the
United States the researchers were able to find only fifty-five schools that
met this very modest definition of "effective."

The researchers then examined these schools to find what qualities they had
in common. Of the five they found, two struck me as crucial: (1) if the
students did not learn, the schools did not blame them, or their families,
backgrounds, neighborhoods, attitudes, nervous systems, or whatever. They
did not alibi. They took full responsibility for the results or non-results of
their work. (2) When something they were doing in the class did not work,
they stopped doing it, and tried to do something else. They flunked
unsuccessful methods, not the children.

If we could only persuade more teachers and administrators to think this

way, we would soon see improvement in our schools. But there seems little
chance that this will happen in any near future. All the tendencies point the
other way. The worse the results, the more the schools claim that they are
doing the right thing and that the bad results are not their fault. A final
observation. The destruction of children's intelligence that I describe here
was going on more than twenty years ago.
 STRATEGY

February 13, 1958

I can't get Nell out of my mind. When she talked with me about fractions
today, it was as if her mind reflected understanding. Isn't this usual? Kids
often resist understanding, make no effort to understand; but they don't often
grasp an idea and then throw it away. Do they? But this seemed to be what
Nell was doing. Several times she would make a real effort to follow my
words, and did follow them, through a number of steps. Then, just as it
seemed she was on the point of getting the idea, she would shake her head
and say, "I don't get it." Can a child have a vested interest in failure? What
on earth could it be? Martha, playing the number game, often acts the same
way. She does not understand, does not want to understand, does not listen
when you are explaining, and then says, "I'm all mixed up."

There may be a connection here with producer-thinker strategies. [We used

the word producer to describe the student who was only interested in getting
right answers, and who made more or less uncritical use of rules and
formulae to get them; we called thinker the student who tried to think about
the meaning, the reality, of whatever it was he was working on.] A student
who jumps at the right answer and misses often falls back into defeatism and
despair because he doesn't know what else to do. The thinker is more willing
to plug on.

It is surprising to hear so many of these kids say "I'm dumb." I thought this
kind of thing came later, with the bogey, adolescence. Apparently not.

My room group did fairly well today at the number game. [At certain
periods, two thirds of the class was away at art or shop classes, and the rest
stayed with me for "room period," a special class, invented by Bill Hull. We
met in a small room just off the classroom. There we played various kinds of
intellectual games, did puzzles, and held discussions in a way as little like
ordinary classroom work as possible. On this occasion we played a game
like Twenty Questions, in which the teacher thinks of a number and the
students try to find it by asking questions to which the teacher may answer
yes or no.] Laura was consistently the poorest asker of questions. It
happened that on several occasions her turn came when the choice of
numbers had been narrowed down to three or four, and she guessed the
number. This made her feel that she was the official number guesser for the
day. In one game she made her first guess at an individual number when
there were still twelve numbers left to choose from—obviously a poor move.
Once she guessed, others started doing the same, and wasted four turns on it.
Later on Mary got the idea that she was a mind reader, and started trying to
guess the numbers from the beginning. The rest of her team became infected
with this strategy for a while, before they went back to the plan of closing in
on the number.

On the whole they were poised and collected and worked well as a team,
though they didn't eliminate enough numbers at a turn. Thus, knowing that
the number was between 250 and 300, they would say, "Is it between 250
and 260?" instead of taking a larger bite.

Nancy played well, but after a point the tension of the game got to be too
much for her and her mind just stopped working. She didn't get frantic, like
Nell or Martha, or make fantastic guesses; she just couldn’t think of
anything to say, and so said nothing. A safe policy.

February 18, 1958

Intelligence is a mystery. We hear it said that most people never develop

more than a very small part of their latent intellectual capacity. Probably not;
but why not? Most of us have our engines running at about ten percent of
their power. Why no more? And how do some people manage to keep
revved up to twenty percent or thirty percent of their full power — or even
more?

What turns the power off, or keeps it from ever being turned on?

During these past four years at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School my
nose has been rubbed in the problem. When I started, I thought that some
people were just born smarter than others and that not much could be done
about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It
isn't hard to believe, if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or
the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing
Students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations,
sports, and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people
are much smarter part of the time than they are at other times. Why? Why
should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant,
imaginative, analytical, in a word, intelligent, come into the class-room and,
as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt?

The worst student we had, the worst I have ever encountered, was in his life
outside the classroom as mature, intelligent, and interesting a person as
anyone at the school. What went wrong? Experts muttered to his parents
about brain damage—a handy way to end a mystery that you can't explain
otherwise. Somewhere along the line, his intelligence became disconnected
from his schooling. Where? Why?

This past year I had some terrible students. I failed more kids, mostly in
French and Algebra, than did all the rest of the teachers in the school
together. I did my best to get them through, good-ness knows. Before every
test we had a big cram session of practice work, politely known as "review."
When they failed the exam, we had post mortems, then more review, then a
makeup test (always easier than the first), which they almost always failed
again.

I thought I knew how to deal with the problem: make the work interesting
and the classroom a lively and enthusiastic place. It was, too, many of these
failing students actually liked my classes. Overcome children's fear of
saying what they don't understand, and keep explaining until they do
understand. Keep a steady and resolute pressure on them. These things I did.
Result? The good students stayed good, and some may have got better; but
the bad students stayed bad, and some of them seemed to get worse. If they
were failing in November they were still failing in June. There must be a
better answer. Maybe we can prevent kids from becoming chronic failers in
the first place.

February 24, 1958

Observing in Bill Hull's Class:__________________

In today's work period three or four people came up to you for help. All
were stuck on that second math problem. None of them had made any effort
to listen when you were explaining it at the board. I had been watching
George, who had busied himself during the explanation by trying with a
pencil, to ream and countersink a hole in the side of his desk, all the while
you were talking. He indignantly denied this. I showed him the hole, which
silenced him. Gerald was in dreamland so for the most part was Nancy,
though she made a good recovery when asked a question. Unusual for her.
Don listened about half the time, Laura about the same. Martha amused
herself by turning her hand into an animal and having it crawl around her
desk.

Watching older kids study, or try to study, I saw after a while that they were
not sufficiently self-aware to know when their minds had wandered off the
subject. When, by speaking his name, I called a daydreamer back to earth, he
was always startled, not because he had thought I wouldn't notice that he had
stopped studying, but because he hadn't noticed.

Except by inflicting real pain on myself, I am never able to stay awake when
a certain kind of sleepiness comes over me. The mind plays funny tricks at
such times. I remember my own School experience of falling asleep in class
while listening to the teacher's voice. I used to find that the "watchman" part
of my mind that was saying. "Keep awake, you fool" would wake me when
the teacher's voice began to fade. But the part of my mind that wanted or
needed sleep was not so easily beaten. It used to (and still does) counterfeit a
voice, so that as I fell asleep an imaginary voice continued to sound in my
head, long enough to fool me after the watchman no longer had the power to
awaken me. The watchman learned, in turn, that this counterfeit voice was
liable to be talking about something different, or pure nonsense, and thus
learned to recognize it as a counterfeit. Many times, I have dozed off with a
voice sounding inside my head, only to have the watchman say "Hey! Wake
up! That voice is a phony!"

Most of us have very imperfect control over our attention. Our minds slip
away from duty before we realize that they are gone. Part of being a good
student is learning to be aware of that state of ones own mind and the degree
of one's own understanding. The good student may be one who often says
that he does not understand, simply because he keeps a constant check on his
understanding. The poor student, who does not, so to speak, watch himself
trying to understand, does not know most of the time whether he understands
or not. Thus the problem is not to get students to ask us what they don't
know; the problem is to make them aware of the difference between what
they know and what they don't.

All this makes me think of Herb. I saw the other day why his words so often
run off the paper. When he is copying a word, he copies about two letters at
a time. I doubt whether he looks beyond them, or that he could tell you, in
the middle of a word, what the whole word was. He has no idea, when he
begins to copy a word, how long the word is going to be, or how much room
it may take up.

April 21, 1958

I watched Ruth during the period of the math test. At least four fifths of the
time she was looking out the window, or else she played with her pencil, or
chewed her fingernails, or looked at Nell to see what information she might
pick up. She did not look in the least worried or confused. It looked as if she
had decided that math tests were to be done, not during the regular test
period, when everyone else does them, but during conference period on
Friday, with teacher close at hand, so that if she got into a jam she could get
instant help.

She seems to find the situation of not knowing what to do so painful that she
prefers to do nothing at all, waiting instead for a time when she can call for
help the moment she gets shuck. Even in conference period today she did
next to nothing. She was trying, to sneak something out of her desk. She
moves rather jerkily, so every time she raised the desk lid, I saw it out of the
corner of my eye and looked at her. This was rather frustrating for her;
however, she kept right on trying for most of the period, not a bit abashed by
being caught at it all the time.

Remember when Emily, asked to spell "microscopic," wrote MINCOPERT?

That must have been several weeks ago. Today I wrote MINCOPERT on the
board. To my great surprise, she recognized it. Some of the kids, watching
me write it, said in amazement, "What's that for?" I said, "What do you
think?" Emily answered. "It's supposed to be 'microscopic.' " But she gave
not the least sign of knowing that she was the person who had written
MINCOPERT.

On the diagnostic spelling test, she spelled "tariff" as TEARERFIT. Today I

thought I would try her again on it. This time she wrote TEARFIT. What
does she do in such cases? Her reading aloud gives a clue. She closes her
eyes and makes a dash for it, like someone running past a graveyard on a
dark night. No looking back afterward, either.

Reminds me of a fragment of The Ancient Mariner - perhaps the world's best

short ghost story:
 Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Is this the way some of these children make their way through life?

May 8, 1958

Memo to the Research Committee:___________________

This school, like many, had a number of academic committees—Math,

English, History, etc.—where teachers discussed what they should be
teaching. But Bill Hull, who had taught at the school for ten years before I
arrived, knew that these committees were not examining children's thinking
and work in the way that he and I were trying to do in our class. He thought
that some teachers might like to come together from time to time to talk
about children's problems with learning, about their intellectual behavior in
class, why this behavior so often prevented learning, and what we I might do
to change that behavior. At the first meeting of this committee, which we
called the Research Committee, there were perhaps a dozen teachers. By the
second meeting, when it was clearer what Bill wanted to look into and talk
about, the number had fallen off. After about three or four meetings there
were so few teachers interested in going on with this discussion that we gave
up the committee. Nobody seemed to mind.

I have mentioned Emily, who spelled "microscopic" MINCOPERT. She

obviously made a wild grab at an answer, and having written it down never
looked at it, never checked to see if it looked right. I see a lot of this one-
way, don't-look-back-it's-too awful strategy among students. Emily in
particular has shown instances of it so striking that I would like you to know
about them.

Some time after the spelling test in question I wrote MINCOPERT on the
blackboard. Emily and one other student—a good speller, interestingly
enough- said that it was supposed to be "microscopic." Everyone found this
very amusing, including Emily. She is a child who shows in her voice, look,
coloring, and gestures much of what she is thinking and she has not shown
the least indication that she knows she is the creator of MINCOPERT. In
fact, her attitude suggests that she rejects scornfully the idea that she would
ever be so foolish as to spell the word in such a way.

Today she handed me, for display, a piece of tagboard on which she had
pasted some jokes that a friend had cut out of a newspaper. I found when I
got to the last one that she had put the paste on the joke side, so that all there
was to read was the meaningless fragment of a news story. I was surprised
that she would paste a joke on backwards, without even looking to see
whether she had it on the right way. When it was posted, and the other kids
were looking at it, I said to Emily, "You'll have to explain that last joke to
us; we don't get it." I thought she might look at it, for the first time, see that
it was meaningless, and realize that she had pasted it on backside up. To my
amazement, she smiled and said with the utmost nonchalance, "As a matter
of fact, I don't get it myself." She had looked at it. She was perfectly ready to
accept the fact that she had posted a joke that was meaningless. The
possibility that she had made a mistake, and that the real joke was on the
other side, did not occur to her.

I am curious about the ability of children to turn things around in their

minds. One day, in room period, I asked the children to write on paper
certain words that I had showed them, and then write what these would look
like if seen in a mirror. I told them to be sure to write the words exactly as I
did, with the same use of capital or lowercase letters. First I wrote CAT.
Emily wrote CAt. It didn't trouble her that two letters were capitals and one
lowercase - if she noticed it at all. She assumed that seen in a mirror the
order of letters would be reversed, so she wrote TaC. The lowercase t
became capital; the A became lower case. The next word was BIRD. She
completely forgot what she had just done-about reversing the order of the
letters. This time she assumed that the trick was to write each letter
backwards, while keeping them in the original order. On her paper she had
written BIrD. She reversed the B correctly, wrote the I, then looked at the
lowercase r, which must have looked to her like an upside down L,
decided, "I must turn this right side up," and wrote L. Then she decided that
the letters B and D should not be reversed, so her final answer was BILD.
Answer to what question? She hadn't the faintest idea. Whatever task she
had set out to do at the beginning had gone from her mind long before she
got to the end of it; it had become changed into something else, something to
do with writing letters upside down, or backwards, or something.
This child must be right. She cannot bear to be wrong, or even to imagine
that she might be wrong.

When she is wrong, as she often is, the only thing to do is to forget it as
quickly as possible. Naturally she will not tell herself that she is wrong, it is
bad enough when others tell her. When she is told to do something, she does
it quickly and fearfully, hands it to some higher authority, and awaits the
magic word right or wrong. If the word is right, she does not have to think
about that problem anymore; if the word is wrong, she does not want to,
cannot bring herself to think about it.

This fear leads her to other strategies, which other children used as well. She
knows that in a recitation period the teacher's attention is divided among
twenty students. She also knows the teacher's strategy of asking questions of
students who seem confused, or not paying attention. She therefore feels safe
waving her hand in the air, as if she were bursting to tell the answer, whether
she really knows it or not. This is her safe way of telling me that she, at
least, knows all about whatever is going on in class. When someone else
answers correctly, she nods her head in emphatic agreement. Sometimes she
even adds a comment, though her expression and tone of voice show that she
feels this is risky. It is also interesting to note that she does not raise her
hand unless there are at least- half a dozen other hands up.

Sometimes she gets called on. The question arose the other day, "What is
half of forty-eight?" Her hand was up; in the tiniest whisper she said,
'Twenty-four." I asked her to repeat it. She said, loudly, "I said," then
whispered "twenty-four," I asked her to repeat it again, because many
couldn't hear her. Her face showing tension, she said, very loudly, "I said
that one half of forty-eight is..." and then, very softly, "twenty-four." Still,
not many of the students heard. She said, indignantly, "Okay, I’ll shout." I
said that that would be fine. She shouted, in a self-righteous tone, "The
question is, what is half of forty-eight, right?" I agreed. And once again, in a
voice scarcely above a whisper, she said, '"twenty four." I could not
convince her that she had shouted the question but not the answer.

Of course, this is a strategy that often pays off, A teacher who asks a
question is tuned to the right answer, ready to hear it, eager to hear it, since it
will tell him that his teaching is good and that he can go on to the next topic.
He will assume that anything that sounds close to the right answer is meant
to be the right answer. So, for a student who is not sure of the answer, a
mumble may be his best bet. If he's not sure whether something is spelled
with an a or an o, he writes a letter that could be either one of them.

The mumble strategy is particularly effective in language classes. In my

French classes, the students used to work it on me, without my knowing
what was going on. It is particularly effective with a teacher who is finicky
about accents and proud of his own. To get such a teacher to answer his own
questions is a cinch. Just make some mumbled, garbled, hideously un-
French answer, and the teacher, with a shudder, will give the correct answer
in elegant French. The student will have to repeat it after him, but by that
time, he is out of the worst danger.

Game theorists have a name for the strategy, which maximizes your chances
of winning and minimizes your losses if you should lose. They call it
minimax. Kids are expert at finding such strategies. They can always find
ways to hedge, to cover their bets. Not long ago, in room period, we were
working with a balance beam. A wooden arm or beam is marked off at
regular intervals and balanced on a pivot at its midpoint. The beam can be
locked in a balanced position with a peg. We put a weight at a chosen point
on one side of the beam, then give the student another weight, perhaps the
same, perhaps heavier, perhaps lighter, which he is to place on the other side
of the beam so that, when the beam is unlocked, it will stay in the balanced
position. When a student has placed the weight, the other members of his
group say, in turn, whether they think the beam will balance or not.

One day it was Emily's turn to place the weight. After much thought, she
placed it wrongly. One by one, the members of the "group" said that they
thought it would not balance. As each one spoke, she had less and less
confidence in her choice. Finally, when they had all spoken and she had to
unlock the beam, she looked around and said brightly, "I don't think it's
going to balance either, personally." Written words cannot convey the tone
of her voice: she had completely dissociated herself from that foolish person
(whoever it was) who had placed the weight on such a ridiculous spot. When
she pulled the peg and the beam swung wildly, she almost seemed to feel
vindicated. Most of the children hedge their bets, but few do it so
unashamedly, and some even seem to feel that there is something
dishonorable in having so little courage of your own convictions.
 I see now that I was wrong about Emily's task. The task for her was not to
spell "microscopic," or write a word backwards, or balance a weight The
thought in her mind must have been something like this: "These teachers
want me to do something. I haven't got the faintest idea what it is, or why in
the world they want me to do it. But I’ll do something, and then maybe
they'll let me alone."

May 10, 1958

Children are often quite frank about the strategies they use to get answers
out of a teacher. I once observed a class in which the teacher was testing her
students on parts of speech. On the blackboard she had three columns,
headed Noun, Adjective, and Verb. As she gave each word, she called on a
child and asked in which column the word belonged.

Like most teachers, she hadn't thought enough about what she was doing to
realize, first, that many of the words given could fit into more than one
column and, second, that it is often the way a word is used that determines
what part of speech it is.

There was a good deal of the tried-and-true strategy of guess-and-look, in

which you start to say a word, all the while scrutinizing the teacher's face to
see whether you are on the right track or not. With most teachers, no further
strategies are needed. This one was more poker-faced than most, so guess-
and-look wasn't working very well. Still, the percentage of hits was
remarkably high, especially since it was clear to me from the way the
children were talking and acting that they hadn't a notion of what nouns,
adjectives, and verbs were. Finally one child said, "Miss —, you shouldn't
point to the answer each time." The teacher was surprised, and asked what
she meant. The child said, "Well, you don't exactly point, but you kind of
stand next to the answer." This was no clearer, since the teacher had been
standing still. But after a while, as the class went on, I thought I saw what
the girl meant. Since the teacher wrote each word down in its proper column,
she was, in a way, getting herself ready to write, pointing herself at the place
where she would soon be writing. From the angle of her body to the
blackboard the children picked up a subtle clue to the correct answer.

This was not all. At the end of every third word, her three columns came out
even, that is, there were an equal number of nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
This meant that when she started off a new row, you had one chance in three
of getting the right answer by a blind guess; but for the next word, you had
one chance in two, and the last word was a dead giveaway to the lucky
student who was asked it. Hardly any missed this opportunity, in fact, they
answered so quickly that the teacher (brighter than most) caught on to their
system and began keeping her columns uneven, making the strategist's job a
bit harder.

In the midst of all this, there came a vivid example of the kind of things we
say in school that makes no sense, that only bewilders and confuses the
thoughtful child who tries to make sense out of it.

The teacher, whose specialty, by the way, was English, had told these
children that a verb is a word of action—which is not always true. One of
the words she asked was "dream." She was thinking of the noun, and
apparently did not remember that "dream" can as easily be a verb. One little
boy, making a pure guess, said it was a verb. Here the teacher, to be helpful,
contributed one of those "explanations" that are so much more hindrance
than help. She said, "But a verb has to have action; can you give me a
sentence, using 'dream,' that has action?" The child thought a bit, and said, "I
had a dream about the Trojan War." Now it's pretty hard to get much more
action than that. But the teacher told him he was wrong, and he sat silent,
with an utterly baffled and frightened expression on his face. She was so
busy thinking about what she wanted him to say, she was so obsessed with
that right answer hidden in her mind, that she could not think about what he
was really saying and thinking, could not see that his reasoning was logical
and correct, and that the mistake was not his but hers.

At one of our leading prep schools I saw, the other day, an example of the
way in which a teacher may not know what is going on in his own class.

This was a math class. The teacher, an experienced man, was doing the day's
assignment on the blackboard. His way of keeping attention was to ask
various members of the class, as he did each step, "Is that right?" It was a
dull class, and I found it hard to keep my mind on it. It seemed to me that
most students in the class had their minds elsewhere, with a mental sentry
posted to alert them when their names were called. As each name was called,
the boy who was asked if something or other was right answered yes. The
class droned on. In time my mind slipped away altogether, I don't know for
how long. Suddenly something snapped me to attention. I looked at the
teacher. Every boy in the class was looking at him, too. The boy who had
been asked if what had just been written was right, was carefully looking at
the blackboard. After a moment he said, "No, sir, that isn't right, it ought to
be so-and-so." The teacher chuckled appreciatively and said, "You're right, it
should be." He made the change, and the class and I settled back into our
private thoughts for the rest of the period.

After the boys had left, I thanked the teacher for letting me visit. He said,
"You notice I threw them a little curve ball there. I do that every now and
then. Keeps them on their toes." I said something in agreement. It didn't
seem the time or place to tell him that when he threw his little curve ball the
expression in his voice changed enough so that it warned, not only the boys,
but also a complete stranger, that something was coming up and that
attention had better be paid.

Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meeting
by a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He
said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were
using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching
there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book—mumble, guess-and-
look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his
own questions, etc.

But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when others
are sitting in judgment on them.

July 7, 1958

I’ve been reading over the memos from last winter and spring. It is a curious
and unsettling process, the business of changing your mind on a subject
about which you had very positive convictions. After all I have said and
written about the need for keeping children under pressure, I find myself
coming to realize that what hampers their thinking, what drives them into
these narrow and defensive strategies, is a feeling that they must please the
grownups at all costs. The really able thinkers in our class turn out to be,
without exception, children who don't feel so strongly the need to please
grownups. Some of them are good students, some not so good; but good or
not, they don't work to please us, but to please themselves.

Here is Walter, Just the opposite, very eager to do whatever people want him
to do, and very good at doing it. (By conventional standards he was a very
able pupil, so much so that people called him brilliant, which he most
assuredly was not.)

We had the problem "If you are traveling at 40 miles per hour, how long will
it take you to go 10 miles?”
Walter: 4 minutes.
JH (me): How did you get it?
W: Divided the 40 by the 10.
A quick look at my face told him that this would not do. After a
while he wrote, "15 minutes." I wanted to check his understanding.
JH: If you were going 50 miles per hour, how far would you go in 24
minutes?
W: (quickly): 36 miles.
JH: How did you get that?
W: Subtracted 24 from 60.
He still hadn't gotten it. I tried again.
JH: If you were going 50 miles per hour, how far would you go in 30
minutes?
W: 25 miles. 30 minutes is half an hour, and half of 50 is 25.

It sounded as if he knew what he was doing at last. I thought he would have

no trouble with the 24 minutes problem. But it took a long time, with some
hinting from me, before he saw that 24 minutes was 2/5 of an hour, and
therefore that he would go 2/5 of 50 miles, or 20 miles, in 24 minutes.
Would he have discovered it if I had not paved the way with leading
questions? Hard to tell.

Most teachers would have assumed, as I would have once, that when he got
the 15-minutes problem, he knew what he was doing. Even the skeptical
would have been convinced when he gave his explanation about the 30-
minutes problem. Yet in each case he showed that he had not really
understood what he was doing, and it is not at all certain that he understands
yet.

What was his strategy here? Certainly he was numeral shoving. More than
that he was making up a fairly sensible sounding explanation of how he was
doing the problem. And yet, is it not possible, even probable, that in saying
that in half an hour you go half of 50 miles, he was merely doing some word
shoving to go along with his numeral shoving? The explanation sounded
reasonable to me, because, in this case, his way of shoving the numerals
happened to be the right way; but he was just as happy with his explanations
when he was shoving the numerals the wrong way.

This is a disquieting thought. We say and believe that at this school we teach
children to understand the meaning of what they do in math. How? By
giving them (and requiring them to give back to us) "explanations" of what
they do. But let's take a child's-eye view. Might not a child feel, as Walter
obviously did, that in this school you not only have to get the right answer,
but you also have to have the right explanation to go with it; the right
answer, and the right chatter. Yet we see here that a "successful" student can
give the answer and the chatter without understanding at all what he is doing
or saying

Worth noting here that this School, a very selective private school for the
high-IQ children of affluent and ambitious parents, despite its radical past
and "progressive" reputation had by this time gone Back to the Basics with a
vengeance.

July 25, 1958

Observing in Bill Hull's Class: _________________________

Of all I saw and learned this past half year, one thing stands out. What goes
on in the class is not what teachers think-- certainly not what I had always
thought. For years now I have worked with a picture in mind of what my
class was like. This reality, which I felt I knew, was partly physical, partly
mental or spiritual. In other words, I thought I knew, in general, what the
students were doing, and also what they were thinking and feeling. I see now
that my picture of reality was almost wholly false. Why didn’t I see this
before?

Sitting at the side of the room, watching these kids, not so much to check up
on them as to find out what they were like and how they differed from the
teen-agers I have worked with and know, l slowly became aware of
something. Yon can't find out what a child does in class by looking at him
only when he is called on. You have to watch him for long stretches of time
without his knowing it.

During many of the recitation classes, when the class supposedly is working
as a unit, most of the children paid very little attention to what was going on.
Those who most needed to pay attention usually paid the least. The kids who
knew the answer to whatever question you were asking wanted to make sure
that you knew they knew, so their hands were always waving. Also,
knowing the right answer, they were in a position to enjoy to the full the
ridiculous answers that might be given by their less fortunate colleagues. But
as in all classes, these able students are a minority. What of the unsuccessful
majority?

Their attention depended on what was going on in class. Any raising of the
emotional temperature made them prick up their ears. If an argument was
going on, or someone was in trouble, or someone was being laughed at for a
foolish- answer, they took notice. Or if you were explaining to a slow
student something so simple that all the rest knew it, they would wave their
arms and give agonized, half-suppressed cries of "O-o-o-o-oh!” O-o-o-o-
oh!" but most of the time explaining, questioning or discussing was going
on, the majority of children paid little attention or none at all. Some day-
dreamed, and no amount of calling them back to earth with a crash, much as
it amused everyone else, could break them of the habit. Others wrote and
passed notes, or whispered, or held conversations in sign language, or made
doodles or pictures on their papers or desks, or fiddled with objects.

They went on daydreaming, no matter how often they got caught and
embarrassed doing it, because the class, despite our efforts to make it
interesting and safe, was a boring, confusing, and dangerous place, from
which they would escape if they could—and daydreaming was the only way
to escape.

There doesn't seem to be much a teacher can do about this, if he is really

teaching and not just keeping everyone quiet and busy. A teacher in class is
like a man in the woods at night with a powerful flashlight in his hand.
Wherever he turns his light, the creatures on whom it shines are aware of it,
and do not behave as they do in the dark. Thus the mere fact of his watching
their behavior changes it into something very different. Shine where be will,
he can never know very much of the night life of the woods.

So, in class, the teacher can turn the spotlight of his attention now on this
child, now on that, now on them all; but the children know when his
attention is on them and do not act at all as they do when it is elsewhere. A
teacher, who is really thinking about what a particular child is doing or
asking, or about what he, himself, is trying to explain, will not be able to
know what all the rest of the class is doing. And if he does notice that other
children are doing what they should not, and tells them to stop, they know
they have only to wait until be gets back, as he must, to his real job.
Classroom observers don't seem to see much of this. Why not? Some of
them do not stay with a class long enough for the children to begin to act
naturally in their presence. But even those who are with a class for a long
time make the mistake of watching the teacher too much and the children too
little. Student teachers in training spend long periods of time in one
classroom, but they think they are in there to learn How To Teach, to pick up
the tricks of child management from watching a Master At Work. Their
concern is with manipulating and controlling children rather than
understanding them. So they watch the teacher, see only what the teacher
sees, and thus lose most of what could be a valuable experience.

There should be more situations in which two experienced teachers share the
same class, teaching and observing the same group of kids, thinking, and
talking to each other, about what they see and hear. Schools can't afford to
support this; they can barely pay the one teacher in each class. I should think
foundations might be willing to support this kind of work. They seem ready
at the drop of a hat to spend millions of dollars on grandiose protects which
produce, in the main, only publicity and doctoral dissertations. Perhaps they
feel that to have two teachers learn a great deal more about children than
they knew before is not worth spending money on. If so, I think they're
wrong. When I think what this year's experience has revealed about
children's work, behavior, and thought, what avenues of exploration and
speculation it has opened up, I can only wonder what extraordinary
discoveries about learning might be made if other teachers in other places
could work in this way.

This gives a clue about what adults should be doing when they work alone
in school classrooms. It is what I came to do more and more in my own
fifth-grade class three years later, and what James Herndon describes doing
in How to Survive in Your Native Land. The teacher first of all tries to
prepare a place—a physical, intellectual, and emotional space—in which the
students will have a good chance of leading a fairly interesting life. Then the
teacher's big job is to see what the students do in that space. In G. B. Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra, the queen tells her maids in waiting that Caesar told
her to let them say anything they wanted to and that when she asked why
she should let them do that, he replied, "So that you can learn from them
what they are." Exactly. What we need to learn about our students is what
they are, and the way to do this is not to read file folders stuffed full of
pseudopsychological diagnoses and long fancy lists of what is wrong with
them, but to give them some freedom of thought, speech, and action, as
much as the school will allow, and then see what they do.

If we look at children only to see whether they are doing what we want or
don't want them to do, we are likely to miss all the things about them that are
the most interesting and important. This is one reason why so many
classroom teachers, even after years of experience, understand so little about
the real nature of children. People teaching their children at home
consistently do a good job because they have the time—and the desire—to
know their children, their interests, the signs by which they show and
express their feelings. Only as teachers in schools free themselves from their
traditional teacher tasks—boss, cop, judge—will they be able to learn
enough about their students to see how best to be of use to them.

When, without any very great plan in mind, I began to allow more and more
time during the school day for my students to talk to and do things with each
other, I began to learn enough about them, their experiences and ideas and
interests, so that I could see some ways to make the classroom a more useful
place for them. They had to teach me before I could begin to teach them.

Thus when I learned, from hearing her talk to her friends, that one of my
students loved
Horses, I was able to help her with her ‘reading problem’ by putting within
her reach a copy of National Velvet. She loved it, as I thought she would,
and her love for the story and the people in it gave her the desire and
strength to overcome her "reading problem"—which was mostly the fear
that she really couldn't learn to read, and the shame she would feel if this
proved to be so.

July 27, 1958

It has become clear over the year that these children see school almost
entirely in terms of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that we impose on
them. This is not at all the way the teacher thinks of it. The conscientious
teacher thinks of himself as taking his students (at least part way) on a
journey to some glorious destination, well worth the pains of the trip. If he
teaches history, he thinks how interesting, how exciting, how useful it is to
know history, and how fortunate his students will be when they begin to
share his knowledge. If he teaches French, he thinks of the glories of French
literature, or the beauty of spoken French, or the delights of French cooking,
and how he is helping to make these joys available to his students. And so
for all subjects.

Thus teachers feel, as I once did, that their interests and their students' are
fundamentally the same. I used to feel that I was guiding and helping my
students on a journey that they wanted to take but could not take without my
help. I knew the way looked hard, but I assumed they could see the goal
almost as clearly as I and that they were almost as eager to reach it. It
seemed very important to give students this feeling of being on a journey to
a worthwhile destination. I see now that most of my talk to this end was
wasted breath. Maybe I thought the students were in my class because they
were eager to learn what I was trying to teach, but they knew better. They
were in school because they had to be, and in my class either because they
had to be or because otherwise they would have had to be in another class,
which might be even worse.

Children in school are like children at the doctor's. He can talk himself blue
in the face about how much good his medicine is going to do them; all they
think of is how much it will hurt or how bad it will taste. Given their own
way, they would have none of it.

So the valiant and resolute band of travelers I thought I was leading toward a
much-hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts in a
chain gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path
leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more
than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place where
they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to
make your life unpleasant if you don't do them or don't do them right.

For children, the central business of school is not learning, whatever this
vague word means; it is getting these daily tasks done, or at least out of the
way, with a minimum of effort and unpleasantness. Each task is an end in
itself. The children don't care how they dispose of it. If they can get it out of
the way by doing it, they will do it; if experience has taught them that this
does not work very well, they will turn to other means, illegitimate means,
that wholly defeat whatever purpose the task giver may have had in mind.
They are very good at this, at getting other people to do their tasks for them.
I remember the day not long ago when Ruth opened my eyes. We had been
doing math, and I was pleased with myself because, instead of telling her
answers and showing her how to do problems, I was "making her think" by
asking her questions. It was slow work. Question after question met only
silence. She said nothing, did nothing, just sat and looked at me through
those glasses, and waited. Each time, I had to think of a question easier and
more pointed than the last, until I finally found one so easy that she would
feel safe in answering it. So we inched our way along until suddenly,
looking at her as I waited for an answer to a question, I saw with a start that
she was not at all puzzled by what I had asked her. In fact, she was not even
thinking about it. She was coolly appraising me, weighing my patience,
waiting for that next, sure-to-be-easier question. I thought, "I've been had!"
The girl had learned how to make me do her work for her, just as she had
learned to make all her previous teachers do the same thing. If I wouldn't tell
her the answers, very well, she would just let me question her right up to
them.

Schools and teachers seem generally to be as blind to children's strategies as

I was. Otherwise, they would teach their courses and assign their tasks so
that students who really thought about the meaning of the subject would
have the best chance of succeeding, while those who tried to do the tasks by
illegitimate means, without thinking or understanding, would be foiled. But
the reverse seems to be the case. Schools give every encouragement to
producers, the kids whose idea is to get "right answers" by any and all
means. In a system that runs on "right answers," they can hardly help it. And
these schools are often very discouraging places for thinkers.

Until recently it had not occurred to me that poor students thought

differently about their work than good students; I assumed they thought the
same way, only less skillfully. Now it begins to look as if the expectation
and fear of failure, if strong enough, may lead children to act and think in a
special way, to adopt strategies different from those of more confident
children. Emily is a good example. She is emotionally as well as
intellectually incapable of checking her work, of comparing her ideas against
reality, of making any kind of judgment about the value of her thoughts. She
makes me think of an animal fleeing danger—go like the wind, don't look
back, remember where that danger was, and stay away from it as far as you
can. Are there many other children who react to their fears in this way?
September 22, 1958

It doesn't take children long to figure out their teachers. Some of these kids
already know that what pays off with us is plenty of talk, lots of ideas, even
if they are wild. What can we do for the kids who may like to think but don't
like to talk?

In my math classes I am on the horns of another dilemma. I want the kids to

think about what they are doing. If I make the questions too hard, they begin
trying to read my mind, or, as they did this morning, they throw out wild
ideas, taking all too literally my statement that a wrong idea is better than
none. If, on the other hand, I break the subject down into little lumps, so that
when I ask a question most of the class will be able to answer with
confidence, am I not doing what I found I was doing for Ruth last year,
doing most of their thinking for them?

Perhaps there is no middle position, and what I must do is ask hard questions
some of the time, easy questions other times.

The trouble was that I was asking too many questions. In time I learned to
shut up and stop asking questions, stop constantly trying to find out how
much people understood. We have to let learners decide when they want to
ask questions. It often takes them a long time even to find out what questions
they want to ask. It is not the teacher's proper task to be constantly testing
and checking the understanding of the learner. That's the learner's task, and
only the learner can do it. The teacher's job is to answer questions when
learners ask them, or to try to help learners understand better when they ask
for that help.

We were trying to find out what children understood so that we could help
them understand better. But to them our tests of their understanding were
just like any other kind of school tests. They just made them more nervous
and confused than ever.

October 13, 1958

What the sixth-grade teachers said the other day suggests that some of our
last year's strategists have not reformed. Let's not be too discouraged about
this. Given these children whose strategies are shortsighted and self-
defeating, these answer grabbers and teacher pleasers, we can to some
extent, and over a long period of time, create situations in which some of
them may be willing to use their minds in better ways. Some of these, in
turn, may even carry these new ways of thinking into a new situation, but we
can't expect that they all will. Most of them will probably drop back into the
strategies with which they are most familiar and comfortable.

Not many children, in one school year, are going to remake their whole way
of dealing with life. With luck, we can give some of them a feeling of what
it is like to turn one's full intelligence on a problem, to think creatively,
originally, and constructively instead of defensively and evasively. We can
hope that they will enjoy the experience enough to want to try it again, but it
is only a hope. To put it another way, we can try to give them a glimpse of
an intellectual foreign country, and even persuade them to visit it for a while,
but it would take more time than we have to make them citizens of that
country.

There's no telling what might be done with children if, from their very first
days in school, we concentrated on creating the conditions in which
intelligence was most likely to grow. Of course, setting up the conditions
under which good thinking can be done does not always mean that it will be
done.

Take Sam. He seems temperamentally ready to think well, but he rarely

does. The other day I had some number series on the board and asked the
class to tell me any relationships they could see in them. Sam's first two or
three observations were of this order: "There's a one in the top line and a one
in the middle line, and there's a two in the third number and a two in the fifth
number. . . ." Very trivial, very local, no generality among them at all. Then,
in the middle of all this, he came up with a very powerful generalization that
I had not even seen myself.

The funny thing is that I don't think he felt that one of these ideas was any
better than another. He might one day say that horses and cows were similar
in that they were domestic farm animals that ate grass; and the next day that
they were alike because he had never ridden on either, or something like
that. How can we help him to see that some ways of looking at things,
ordering things, are more useful than others?

We have to convince the children that they must not be afraid to ask
questions; but further than that, we must get across the idea that some
questions are more useful than others, and that to the right kind of question
the answer "No" can be as revealing as "Yes." Here is where Twenty
Questions, the card game, the balance beam, all come in handy. The scientist
who asks a question of nature—i.e., performs an experiment—tries to ask
one such that he will gain information whichever way his experiment comes
out, and will have an idea of what to do next. He asks his questions with a
purpose. This is a subtle art. Can fifth-graders learn some of it?

When Nancy and Sheila worked the balance beam last year, they were often
close to the truth, but they could never hang on to it because they could
never express their ideas in a form they could test with an experiment. Once
one of them said, "Things weigh more further out." This was a big step; but
they couldn't think of a way to check or refine this insight, they couldn't ask
themselves (to use their terms) how much more things weigh when they get
further out.

The very natural mistake that Bill and I made was to think that the
differences between the children in our class had to do with techniques of
thinking, that the successful kids had good techniques of thinking while the
unsuccessful, the "producers," had bad, and therefore that our task was to
teach better techniques. But the unsuccessful kids were not trying, however
badly, to do the same things as the successful. They were doing something
altogether different. They saw the school and their task in it differently. It
was a place of danger, and their task was, as far as they could, to stay out of
danger. Their business was not learning, but escaping.

About three years later I was working, among other things, as a special
reading instructor or tutor in the school where for a couple of years I had
taught fifth grade. I had persuaded the school to use in its first-grade
classrooms Gattegno's Words in Color, a very ingenious set of materials, in
which each sound of spoken English had its own color.

One of the boys I was tutoring was a seven year-old who was not learning
to read and was resisting all efforts to teach him. So I was asked to work
with him alone. My method was to take letters that I had cut out of one of
the Words in Color charts, use these letters to make short syllables, and ask
him to read them. I see now that it would probably have been better to let
him make the syllables and/or words and let me pronounce them—though
from time to time we may also have worked in that way.
At any rate, I would use the letters to make a word like PAT. I'd ask him to
read it, and he would. Then I would remove the P and put a C in its place,
and ask him to read that. Gattegno called these "transformations," seeing
how changing one letter in a word could change the sound of the word—a
good idea. The boy would do three or four of these transformations perfectly
correctly, though slowly—which meant, I see now, that he really could read,
really did understand what reading was all about. But then all at once he
would spring his nonsense syllable at me. It was always the same one. We
might be working with words that had no letter I or T in them at all—say,
RUN, FUN, BUN. Suddenly, when I asked him to read a word, he would say
"stut." I would say, "What?" "Stut," he would say, calmly and clearly.

That word rocked me back. Just as I would begin to think "He's really
getting it, he's getting the idea of words and sounds," along would come this
absurd syllable. How could he have made such a mistake? What did it
mean? How was I to deal with it? '

It took me a long time—many weeks or even months—to realize that when

this boy said "Stut," he was not making a mistake at all. He was changing the
situation. He had been doing one task that I had given him, to try to figure
out the words I had put in front of him. Now he was doing a different task,
getting himself a short rest, and me off his back for a while. Indeed, he was
giving me a little task of my own, to figure out what in the world made him
say "stut," and what in the world I was going to do about it. The ball had
been in his court; now it was in mine.

Eventually I figured out what was happening. Perhaps it was the way he was
looking at me—not at all the rather tense and concentrated way he looked at
the words, but calmly and curiously. He was looking to see what I would do
next. I was now his guinea pig, not he mine.

Since by this time I already knew the strategy of guess-and-look, I had

learned, when I gave him a word to decode, to turn away so that he could not
see my face. If he made a wrong guess or choice, I simply sat there and
waited for him to make another. I said nothing; I let him be in charge of the
pace of our work. But when he said "stut," I usually turned round to look at
him. In time I learned not to do that. When he said "stut," I said nothing, did
not move, just waited. Often there might be a silence of a minute or two.
Then the boy, having meanwhile had a nice rest, would realize that
somehow the ball had got out of my court and back into his. After a while he
would go on with his work.

None of this accomplished much, for reasons not clear to me then but much
clearer now. This boy could in fact read, could "decode" simple words. But
he did not want to, and had decided to refuse to.

It would probably have been much more useful for him and for me if I had
used our time together to read aloud to him from books of his choosing, or
let him read them silently, with the understanding that whenever he wanted,
he could ask me what a word meant and I would tell him—without any
questions, explanations, or sound-it-outs.

December 7, 1958

Some of our strategists at work:

Atlas Paper #2 asks the students, "What two key words on each index page
of the Atlas tell at a glance which names can be found on that page?" The
students are supposed to notice that the first and the last place names on any
page are printed in larger type at the top of the page—as in a dictionary. The
other day, Abby and Jane could not understand what the instructions were
asking them to do, largely because they were too busy thinking about the
answer to be able to think about the instructions. We studied the examples
given in the paper, but to no avail. Finally I told them to sit at their desks and
think about it some more. A minute or two later Jane appeared at the door
and said indignantly, "Are you sure that it isn't those two words at the top of
the page?" Having said no such thing, I was taken aback, and said with some
surprise, "When did I say that?" She immediately turned to Abby, who was
waiting outside the door, and said, "Write it down!" She had all the clues she
needed.

March 21, 1959

Here are some of the children working on the balance beam experiment
(described in the memo of May 8, 1958). One child has placed the weight
where he thinks it will balance the beam; the others are being asked to
predict whether it will balance.

Abby: It might move a little to one side—not much.

 Elaine: It might teeter a little, then balance, but not really. (She really
is covering all the possibilities.)
Rachel: It might balance.
Pat: It will balance pretty much.
Elaine: Teeter totter a teeny bit, then balance.
In this next example, 4 X 5" means that we put four weights five inches out
on the beam. 2 X ? means that we gave the child 2 weights to place. In this
case, 2x10" would have made the beam balance.

4 X 5"; 2 X ? Elaine put them at 2", then at 1", then at 9". I asked, "Is that
your choice?" She said, "Yes, but I don't think it will balance." The object of
the experiment was to make it balance! She decided to leave the weights at
9".

Asked if it would balance, Hester said, "Somehow I think it might."

8 X 2"; 4 X ?

Rachel (moving the weights back and forth without conviction): Probably
won't balance.

Barbara: Put them where you think it will. (Barbara is one of our few
positive strategists, and so in everything she does.)

Rachel put the weights at 1". Needless to say, the beam did not balance.

3 X 2"; 6 X ? Hester scattered the six blocks all over the beam, as if in the
hope that one of them might hit the magic spot.

Barbara's turn. Everyone will predict that the beam will balance.

2 X 3"; 1 X ? First she put them at 5". She is counting out lines instead of
spaces. Then she saw her mistake, and put them at 6". Everyone except
Hester said yes, the beam would balance.

1 X 10"; 2 X ?

Barbara: 2 X 5". Then she said confidently but with some excitement in her
voice, "It's going to do it!"
Elaine: You put a block here (1"), it makes it lighter; here (5") makes it
heavier.

When his turn came, Carry said, "I think it's just going to go down—that's
safer."

1 X 10"; 1 X ? Betty put the weight at 10".

Gil: May go down a little and then come back up.

Garry: It will be about even.

Betty: I sort of think it's going to balance.

4 X 6"; 4 X ? Ralph put them at 6". But two members of the group predicted
that it would not balance; then Betty spoke up: "I'll say it will, just in case it
does, so we won't get too low a score." Talk about minimax!

Our way of scoring was to give the groups a point for each correct
prediction. Before long they were thinking more of ways to get a good score
than of making the beam balance. We wanted them to figure out how to
balance the beam, and introduced the scoring as a matter of motivation. But
they out-smarted us, and figured out ways to get a good score that had
nothing to do with whether the beam balanced or not.

4 X 9"; 4 X ? Sam put them at 9". Ralph said, "He didn't trust me, but I'm
going to trust him, because that's where I would have put it."

Later, Sam said to another player, "Do what you think is right." To which
Betty, usually a positive character, said, "Play safe."

At about this point Betty figured out that the way to get a good score was to
put the weights in what you know is a wrong place, and then have everyone
on your team say that it is wrong. Thus they will each get a point for
predicting correctly. Later, Nat said, "Are no votes just as good as yes
votes?" It was a good question; we should have made yes votes count much
more.

Another group working.

4 X 8"; 4 X ? Tony put them at 7", then said, "Get ready to disagree." Then
he changed them to 8". All predicted yes, but Nat hedged.

Later, when it was his turn to predict, Nat said, "Too bad you have to be so
specific."

Worth noting here that a couple of years later, when I put a balance beam
and some
Weights on a table at the back of class, and just left it there without saying
anything about it or trying to "teach" it, most of the children in the class,
including some very poor students, figured out just by messing around with
it how it worked.

April 28, 1959

Here are some notes from the other day, when the fourth-graders were
playing Twenty Questions.

Many of them are very anxious when their turn comes to ask a question. We
ask them to play Twenty Questions in the hope that, wanting to find the
hidden thought, they will learn to ask more informative and useful questions.

They see the game quite differently: "When my turn comes, I have to ask a
question." They are not the least interested in the object of the game, or
whether their question gains useful information. The problem is simply to
think of a question, any old question. The first danger is that you will just be
sitting there, unable to think of a question. The next danger is that when you
ask a question, other kids will think it is silly, laugh at it, say "That's no
good."

So the problem becomes not just thinking up a question, but thinking up a

question that will sound good. The best way to do this is to listen to kids that
you know are pretty sharp, and ask questions that sound like theirs. Thus, a
child who found in one game that "Is it water?" was a useful question, went
on asking it in game after game, even when other questions had established
that the information sought for had nothing to do with water.

Many of our kids play the same way. Pat, Rachel, and some others never
have any idea what the object of the game is, or what information has been
gained by questions already asked. All they want, when their turn comes, is
to have a question that won't be laughed at. Jessie plays it even safer than
that. She just refuses to ask a question, says, "I pass," and looks very pleased
with herself after she says it, too.

A man wrote us a letter at Growing Without Schooling telling about the

spelling strategy he used at school. When asked to spell a word that he was
not one hundred percent sure of, he simply stood up—and said nothing. No
guesses, no questions—just dead silence. The children, who would almost
certainly have laughed at his wrong guesses, admired his silence. Apparently
he didn't get into any trouble over this, since his teachers did not interpret his
silence as defiance. It was a perfect school strategy.

Bill and I had our silent strategists. They clearly understood that in keeping
quiet they were not doing what we wanted, but they still thought it was their
best bet.

Another popular strategy is the disguised blind guess. When kids first play
this game, every question is a guess. Then some of them see that it is silly to
guess right at the beginning, and that the sensible thing to do is narrow down
the possibilities. They criticize very severely teammates who start guessing
too soon. So the trick becomes to ask a guessing question that doesn't sound
like a guess, like Nat's classic, "Was he killed by Brutus?" This has become
something of a joke in his group. Still, every question he asks conceals a
guess.

One day we were using the atlas, and the field of the game was geographical
locations. Sam wanted to ask if it was Italy, but that was a guess, so he said,
"Does it look like a boot?" Every time it is his turn, he says, "Can I make a
guess?" The strategy of narrowing down possibilities has not occurred to
him, or if it has, he does not know how to make use of it.

Betty makes multiple guesses. Thinking of either Corsica or Sardinia, she

asked, "Does it begin with C or S?" Another time she said, "Does it begin
with B, D, C, P, or T?" This is not bad strategy. On another occasion she
said to a cautious teammate, "Don't say 'Could it be?'; say 'Is it?' " She's a
positive little critter.

Sometimes we try to track down a number with Twenty Questions. One day
I said I was thinking of a number between 1 and 10,000. Children who use a
good narrowing-down strategy to find a number between 1 and 100, or 1 and
500, go all to pieces when the number is between 1 and 10,000. Many start
guessing from the very beginning. Even when I say that the number is very
large, they will try things like 65, 113, 92. Other kids will narrow down until
they find that the number is in the 8,000's; then they start guessing, as if
there were now so few numbers to choose from that guessing became
worthwhile. Their confidence in these shots in the dark is astonishing. They
say, "We've got it this time!" They are always incredulous when they find
they have not got it.

They still cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes
answer. This, of course, is the result of the miseducation in which "right
answers" are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn
from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say,
"Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?" and I say yes, they cheer; if I
say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of
information in either case. The more anxious ones will, over and over again,
ask questions that have already been answered, just for the satisfaction of
hearing a yes. Their more sophisticated teammates point out in vain that it is
silly to ask a question when you already know the answer.

There is a very simple question that hardly anyone seems to have asked. Of
the things we teachers do, which help learning and which prevent it? The
reason we so seldom ask the question is that we tend to assume that unless
there's something wrong with the student, all teaching produces learning,
so that all we need to think about is what children should be made to learn.

Once we understand that some of the things we teachers do may be helpful,

some merely useless, and some downright harmful, we can begin to ask
which is which. But only teachers can ask such questions and use their daily
work with students to test their answers. All other kinds of research into
ways of improving teaching lead mostly to expensive fads and nonsense.

With the possible exception of economics, education is probably the largest

field of human activity in which there is almost no connection between
theory and experience, in which people rarely test theories to see if they
work and reject or change them if they don't.

Bill Hull and I, in our early work together in the fifth grade, saw correctly
enough that the reason so many children in our classes learned so little was
that they used such bad thinking and problem-solving strategies. What I did
not see until later was that we, our classroom, our position as teachers, which
is to say, givers of orders, judges, graders, were the source of these
children's strategies. We, and not math, or reading, or spelling, or history,
were the problem that the children had designed their strategies to cope with.

It was only later, in another school, that I began to wonder, more intuitively
than consciously, how I might help make a class in which children, free of
danger from me and each other, might once again, as when they were little,
reach out hungrily to reality. This is the most important task of a teacher,
certainly of younger children—to make or make accessible a part of the
world or of human experience which is as interesting, exciting, meaningful,
transparent, and emotionally safe as possible.

This is of course what most people do who "teach" their children at home,
and how they do it is described in great detail in my book Teach Your Own.
But teachers still working in classrooms could learn many useful things from
these parents' accounts of their own work.
 FEAR AND FAILURE

When I wrote earlier of making the children safe from each other I was not
thinking so much of physical violence (though that is everywhere a problem,
even in the earliest grades) as of spiritual violence. Hundreds of people --
teachers, former teachers, student teachers, parents teaching their own
children, children themselves -- have told me that in the classrooms they
have seen, children who can't do things or do them wrong are made fun of
by the other children and very often by the teachers themselves. Most
children in school are at least as afraid of the mockery and contempt of their
peer group as they are of the teacher.

When I began to teach my own fifth-grade class I decided to try to change

that, not so much because I had some big theory about how this would affect
learning--the theories came later--as because I generally like children and
enjoy their company, and I hate to see them behaving meanly and cruelly.

Many of my students came to me from a fourth-grade class in which the

teacher, in many ways intelligent and kindly, had (like many teachers) a
strong need to feel herself the only source of authority and security in the
room. She was not mean to children, and many of the children in her class
liked her. But it had apparently never occurred to her to try to prevent the
children from being mean to each other except, of course, when this took
such noisy or violent forms that it disrupted the class. In the first place she
would probably have said, “What difference does it make whether the
children are mean to each other, why should I work on that problem when I
have so many others?"

In the second place she probably thought, like most adults, that children
are "naturally" cruel and that there was nothing she could do about that,
except perhaps to set some outside limits on their cruelty. Or perhaps,
looking at the children only to see whether they were being good (doing
what she wanted) or bad (not doing it), she did not even notice what they
were doing to each other. Only a year ago a friend of mine told me that in
one of the "best" schools in this area the ten-year-old daughter of a friend of
hers had been made the miserably unhappy victim of a nobody-talk-to-her
conspiracy by the other children, which had gone on for many weeks without
their teacher even noticing it.
 Well, these are all afterthoughts. What I noticed at the time, when the
school year began, was that the children, eager to put themselves one up
with me and their classmates one down, were great tattletales, always
running up to me saying, "Mr. Holt, so-and-so said or did such- and-such." I
hated this, couldn't stand it. So when children ran up with these stories I
would look them in the eye and say in a kind but firm voice, "Mind your
own business." They were astonished. Their mouths fell open. I often had to
say it twice: "Mind your own business." I might then add something like
this: "Thank you for telling me, I appreciate your wanting to help, but
(pointing to eyes) I can see, (and to ears) I can hear, and just with what I can
see and hear I have plenty to keep me occupied. So unless someone is really
hurt or in physical danger, hanging out the window holding on by three
fingers (we were on the third floor), I don't want to hear about it." The
children would walk away puzzled. What kind of class was this? But they
learned the lesson quite fast--it didn't take more than a few weeks for the
tattling to stop.

Let me emphasize again that I did not then have a theory in mind that if I
could make a cooperative class the children would learn a great deal from
each other. If someone had suggested this to me, I might even have been
skeptical. No, I simply wanted to stop, as far as I could, the pettiness,
meanness, and cruelty, just because it spoiled my pleasure in the classroom
and my work. Given that much of a signal from me, the children were happy
to stop. They then created the cooperative class, and they then taught me
how much in such a class they could help and teach and learn from each
other. My part in this was that I allowed it to happen, allowed space and time
for it to happen, and saw, and was pleased, and let the children see I was
pleased, that it was happening.

All of this is something that schools and/or teachers could easily do. It
costs no more money than what they are already doing. The only problem is
that teachers who try to do this, in schools where it has not been made
school policy, may get in trouble--as I got in trouble, as Jim Herndon (see
The Way It Spozed to Be) got in trouble, as any and all teachers get in trouble
whose ideas of order are different from the schools'.

Ideas of order. The phrase comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens --

"Ideas of Order at Key West."
 To give a better glimpse of some of my ideas of order, let me tell about the
Q.

In the first school, where I worked with Bill Hull, Bill left me more and
more in charge of the class, since he was often busy doing math research
with one or two teachers in the early grades. By the late winter and spring of
my second year at that school, it had become almost more my class than his.
I could tolerate and indeed liked a somewhat higher level of noise and
activity in the class than he did, and so allowed it. But this posed me a
problem. I wanted to give children plenty of chance to talk to each other and
enjoy each other's company. But children are energetic and excitable and
tend to get carried away. I needed a way to control the noise, and cut it out
altogether if I had to. I didn't want a permanently quiet classroom, but
neither did I want to get into the business of telling the children--i.e., yelling
at them--to be quiet.

So I invented the Q. I explained to the class why I thought I needed this

invention, said that I liked to give them plenty of chances to talk, but that
sometimes the talk grew too loud, and sometimes I needed quiet so that I
could tell or explain something. So when I wanted quiet I would write a
capital Q in a corner ·of the blackboard. When it was up, the standard school
rule went into effect: no talking unless you raise your hand and get
permission. On a big piece of cardboard I wrote down the rule: "When the Q
is on the board, there shall be no talking except by those who have raised
their hand and had permission." That was the Q sentence. If children talked
when the Q was on the board, I put a mark opposite their names; this was
called, "Giving them a Q." The penalty was that when recess came, for
every Q you had you had to write down the Q sentence once before you
could go off and play. Three Q's, three sentences.

Later I made the sentence a bit shorter, as I didn't want to use up too much
of the children's recess time, partly because I thought it was very important
to them, and partly because the true value of the Q penalty was its nuisance
value, in having to do it at all, in having to spend time, if only a minute,
writing down some fool sentence when everyone else was rushing out into
the play yard and getting things organized. A minute of this writing was just
as effective a deterrent as five minutes would have been, maybe more so.

So that was the Q. When I first put the Q on the board, in the corner, I
drew a little box around it (see illustration). Children being great lawyers,
they began to argue that the Q was not officially on the board until the box
had been drawn. I agreed to that. And then, slowly, the children invented or
developed a delightful custom. When I began to write the Q they would all
make some kind of hum or murmur or sound, which would get louder and
louder, rising to a shriek as I boxed in the Q with a flourish. But as soon as
my chalk hit the edge of the blackboard, completing the box, dead silence.

Now and then I wondered, as we grew used to the Q, whether I ought to

take some steps about that pre-Q shriek. But I didn't. In the first place, I
loved it; it said and says so much about the exuberance and inventiveness of
children, how they can make something interesting out of the simplest
materials, out of next to nothing, even out of something they don't really
like. In the second place, I realized, at first intuitively, later with much
thought, that the shriek was part of what made the Q work--and it worked
very well. It was the children's way of making that Q theirs as well as mine,
and because it was theirs as well as mine, they respected it.

Later, realizing that much of the time what I wanted was quiet, not silence,
I modified the Q. When I wrote a lowercase q in the corner of the board, it
meant that whispering was okay; for talking out loud, the regular Q rule still
applied.

A year later, when I had my own fifth-grade class in another school, I

reintroduced the Q. I told the children that I had invented the Q in my
previous class, explained why I had invented it, and said that it had worked.
I told them nothing else about it. But within a week or two of my
introducing the Q, this class reinvented the shriek. At first the children
simply talked louder and louder as they saw me putting the Q up, but soon
the system was exactly the same, at first a hum and murmur as they saw me
start writing--and I wrote the Q as fast as I could-- rising to a shriek at the
end, which was abruptly cut off when my chalk completed the box around
the Q.

I was more surprised and delighted than I can say when this happened.
Now, I feel quite sure that in any classes where children feel safe and at
home, if teachers introduce the Q, the children will soon invent the Q shriek.
I hope teachers are wise enough to let them.

Only once, in that later class, did the children test the Q. The class was by
this time far more informal than the class in the earlier school, and much
more at ease with me. One day when the Q was up, some of the bolder
students, including some of my special favorites, began to talk a lot. I began
frantically writing down marks. Other children saw what was happening,
and began to talk as well. Mutiny! The game began to be, see how fast we
can make Mr. Holt write down marks. After a while I saw clearly what was
happening. I stopped everything and gave the class a little speech, about like
this: "Look, everyone, I know what's happening here. You're trying to find
out whether you can wreck the Q system, and the answer is, of course you
can. It only works because basically you think it's a pretty fair and sensible
system and are willing to let it work. The only thing is, if we lose the Q
system, what are we going to put in its place? I have to have some way of
getting quiet, or silence, in this room if I feel I need it. I like to let you guys
talk, even if it gets fairly noisy at times, but I have to be able to control it. If
I don't have the Q, I'll have to control it the way the other teachers try to,
which is not to let you talk at all." I went on to ask if they thought the Q
system was unfair. Nobody did. I asked if they wanted to change it in some
way. Nobody did. I said, "Well, okay, let's start again. You've proved your
point; the system can't work unless you want it to work. Now I'll throw out
this sheet of Q marks and we'll go back to the old system." Which we did.
They never tested the Q again. And I have to say that as the year went on
and the class became more and more everyone's class, and not just mine, the
children became good enough at controlling their own noise so that I had
less and less need for the Q. Indeed, if I put it up, it was usually because the
children themselves, wanting a little more peace and quiet, would ask me to.

But the ideas of order of all too many schools are that order should, must,
can only rest on fear, threat, and punishment. They would rather have
systems of order based on fear, even when they don't work, than systems of
order based on the children's cooperation--that work.

March 27, 1958

We agree that all children need to succeed; but do we mean the same
thing? My own feeling is that success should not be quick or easy, and
should not come all the time. Success implies overcoming an obstacle,
including, perhaps, the thought in our minds that we might not succeed. It is
turning "I can't" into "I can, and I did."

We ought also to learn, beginning early, that we don't always succeed. A

good batting average in baseball is .300; a good batting average in life is a
great deal lower than that. Life holds many more defeats than victories for
all of us. Shouldn't we get used to this early? We should learn, too, to aim
higher than we think we can hit. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or
what's a Heaven for?" What we fail to do today, we, or someone, may do
tomorrow. Our failure may pave the way for someone else's success.

Of course we should protect a child, if we can, from a diet of unbroken

failure. More to the point, perhaps, we should see that failure is honorable
and constructive, rather than humiliating. Perhaps we need a semantic
distinction here, between nonsuccess and failure.

It is tempting to think that we can arrange the work of unsuccessful

students so that they think they are succeeding most of the time. But how
can we keep secret from a child what other children of his own age, in his
own or other schools are doing? What some of these kids need is the
experience of doing something really well--so well that they know
themselves, without having to be told, that they have done it well. Maybe
this means that someone must supply them, from outside, with the
concentration and resolution they lack.

I wrote this memo quite early in my collaboration with Bill, when I was
still wearing, like an old torn shirt, shreds of my old conventional teacher's
notion that somehow we could make children do this or that by "holding
them up to high standards."

What I was talking about when I wrote this memo was the idea, common
in many schools, the idea behind programmed instruction, that the way to
make children feel good about themselves is to give them things to do that
are so easy that they can't help but do them. It rarely works. If we and not
the children choose the task, then they think about us instead of the task,
with the crippling results I have shown. We can then only guarantee success
by making the task so incredibly easy that the children cannot find any
pleasure or pride in doing it.

The point I now want to make is that "success," as much as "failure," are
adult ideas which we impose on children. The two ideas go together, are
opposite sides of the same coin. It is nonsense to think that we can give
children a love of "succeeding" without at the same time giving them an
equal dread of "failing."
 Babies learning to walk, and falling down as they try, or healthy six- and
seven-year-olds learning to ride a bike, and falling off, do not think, each
time they fall, "I failed again." Healthy babies or children, tackling difficult
projects of their own choosing, think only when they fall down or off,
"Oops, not yet, try again." Nor do they think, when finally they begin to
walk or ride, "Oh, boy, I'm succeeding!" They think, "Now I'm walking!
Now I'm riding!" The joy is in the act itself, the walking or the riding, not in
some idea of success.

Actually, even for adults, "succeed" (if we are not using it to mean getting
rich and famous) only applies to two-valued tasks like solving a puzzle or
winning a contest, where you have clearly either done it or not done it. This
has nothing to do with most tasks and skills that we do all the time, all our
lives, and get better at as we do them. Playing the cello, learning a new and
(for me) difficult piece, like the string quartets I am working on-Dvorak's
"American" and Schubert's "Death and the Maiden"--I may let myself a
short and specific task, like learning to play certain sections from memory or
to play a certain passage at a certain metronome speed. Of such tasks I can
sometimes say, "Now I have succeeded." (Though I may have to do the task
again a day or two later.) But it is meaningless to talk of "succeeding" in
playing the cello, or even in playing these quartets. There is no line with
Success written on one side and Failure on the other. These words seriously
distort our understanding of how we, as well as children, do things and do
them better.

Children who undertake to do things, like my five-year-old friend Vita

who is beginning the very serious study of the violin, do not think in terms
of success and failure but of effort and adventure. It is only when pleasing
adults become important that the sharp line between success and failure
appears.

December 3, 1958

The other day I decided to talk to the other section about what happens
when you don't understand what is going on. We had been chatting about
something or other, and everyone seemed in a relaxed frame of mind, so I
said, "You know, there's something I'm curious about, and I wonder if you'd
tell me." They said, "What?" I said, "What do you think, what goes through
your mind, when the teacher asks you a question and you don't know the
answer?"
 It was a bombshell. Instantly a paralyzed silence fell on the room.
Everyone stared at me with what I have learned to recognize as a tense
expression. For a long time there wasn't a sound. Finally Ben, who is bolder
than most, broke the tension, and also answered my question, by saying in a
loud voice, “Gulp!"

He spoke for everyone. They all began to clamor, and all said the same
thing, that when the teacher asked them a question and they didn't know the
answer they were scared half to death. I was flabbergasted-to find this in a
school which people think of as progressive; which does its best not to put
pressure on little children; which does not give marks in the lower grades;
which tries to keep children from feeling that they're in some kind of race.

I asked them why they felt gulpish. They said they were afraid of failing,
afraid of being kept back, afraid of being called stupid, afraid of feeling
themselves stupid. Stupid. Why is it such a deadly insult to these children,
almost the worst thing they can think of to call each other? Where do they
learn this?

Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of
them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time. This is a
hard fact of life to deal with. What can we do about it?

December 30, 1958

All fall long, I wondered why Jack fell down so much playing soccer. He
is an agile, well-coordinated boy. His balance is good. People don't knock
him over. Why was he on the ground so often? Suddenly, the other day, I
had the answer.

I discovered it while trying to learn to control the tension that builds up in

me when I practice the flute. Music is a good thing for teachers to study,
because it creates in us the kind of tension that children live under all the
time in the classroom, and that most adults have long forgotten. Incidentally,
it is most interesting when Gattegno explains the Cuisenaire rods [1] to
teachers, to see them under this very tension. They react to it very much like
children, by getting sore at Gattegno, or fighting his ideas, by saying in
elaborate language what fifth-graders say when they are startled by a new
idea--"This is crazy, nutty, cuckoo."
 I have observed many times that children who can do one or two problems
of a certain kind, with no trouble, collapse when given a big sheet of them.
Something like this is true of exercises in music. When I am trying to play
an exercise at (for me) high speed, I am under tension. If the exercise is
short, I feel that I can get through it before tension gets the better of me. But
if it is long, I am less confident from the start that I can get through without
a mistake, and as I play, the inner voice that comments on what I am doing
says: "All right so far; watch that C sharp; oops! Narrow escape, you almost
played F sharp instead of F natural, etc., etc." The voice gets louder and
louder, until finally the communication channels are clogged up,
coordination breaks down, and I make the mistake I have been fearing to
make.

I haven't forgotten Jack and his falling down. One thing I have discovered
is that there is a peculiar kind of relief, a lessening of tension, when you
make a mistake. For when you make one, you no longer have to worry about
whether you are going to make one. Walking a tightrope, you worry about
falling off; once fallen off, you don't have to worry. Children, for whom
making mistakes is acutely painful, are therefore under great tension when
doing something correctly. Worrying about the mistakes they might make is
as bad as--no, worse than-worrying about the mistakes they have made.
Thus, when you tell a child that he has done a problem wrong, you often
hear a sigh of relief. He says, "I knew it would be wrong." He would rather
be wrong, and know it, than not know whether he was wrong or not.

Well, the reason Jack falls down is that this relieves him, for a few
seconds, of the great tension he is under when he plays soccer. Being small,
he is afraid of crashing into bigger boys, but he is also afraid of showing his
fear, and resolutely tries to play the game as he feels he should. This puts his
nervous system under a strain that is too much for it. Being a boy, he can't
pull out of the game, as a girl might do, or just get out of the way of bigger
boys when they come at him. So every now and then he falls down, and thus
gets an honorable rest period for a second or two.

In the next year's fifth grade several of the girls were among the most
physically fearless children in the entire class. But it was true then, much
more than now, that on the matter of admitting or showing fear there was a
different code for boys than for girls.
 This makes me think about written work. Some say that children get
security from large amounts of written work. Maybe. But suppose every
teacher in the school were told that he had to do ten pages of addition
problems, within a given time limit and with no mistakes, or lose his job.
Even if the time given was ample for doing all problems carefully with time
over for checking, the chances are that no teacher would get a perfect paper.
Their anxiety would build up, as it does in me when I play the flute, until it
impaired or wholly broke down their coordination and confidence. Have you
ever found yourself, while doing a simple arithmetic problem, checking the
answer over and over, as if you could not believe that you had done it right?
I have. If we were under the gun as much as the kids in our classes are, we
would do this more often.

Perhaps children need a lot of written work, particularly in math; but they
should not get too much of it at one time. Ask children to spend a whole
period on one paper, and anxiety or boredom is sure to drive them into
foolish errors. It used to puzzle me that the students who made the most
mistakes and got the worst marks were so often the first ones to hand in their
papers. I used to say, "If you finish early, take time to check your work, do
some problems again." Typical teacher's advice; I might as well have told
them to flap their arms and fly. When the paper was in, the tension was
ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about
flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry, it didn't contain the
agonizing element of choice, there was nothing more they could do about it.
Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is
less painful than worrying about the right thing to do.

Children may get some security from doing a lot of written work, if; and
only if, they can decide themselves when and how much of this they want to
do. When we give children long lists of arithmetic problems to do in school,
hoping to create confidence, security, certainty, we usually do quite the
opposite, create boredom, anxiety, less and less sharpness of attention, and
so, more and more mistakes, and so in turn, more and more fear of making
mistakes.

Lore Rasmussen, who became a good friend of Bill's and mine after this
book first came out, worked out in her math classes a way in which children
could and did get security from written work. She invented many varied and
ingenious worksheets (many now commercially available), each one dealing
with a particular aspect of math or arithmetic. She had many copies of these
in a file drawer, and one copy of each in a master catalog on her desk.
Children could look through the catalog, find which worksheet they wanted
to work on, get one out of the file, and do it.

Lore soon found that children would very often do a particular worksheet,
correctly, half a dozen or more times before deciding that they had done it
enough. Children do not drink from dry wells, and these children were not
doing these sheets to get good marks or to please Lore--it was their own
business. Clearly each time they repeated a worksheet they were learning
something new from it, or making more secure what they already knew.
When they felt that they really owned that particular bit of knowledge, they
stopped and went on to something else.

But most homework, when it is not pure busywork to fill up the children's
time, is designed to convince the teacher, not the children, that they know
something. And so it rarely does good, and usually does harm.

One way to keep down tension is to be aware of it. I told the math class
that to let something go by in class without knowing what it means, and
without saying anything, is like leaving something in Howard Johnson's on a
long car trip. You are going to have to go back for it eventually, so the
sooner the better. This foolish analogy has helped the kids, or so they say.
They have learned to recognize, if only a little, the feeling of panicky
confusion that slowly gets hold of them. To be able to say, "I'm getting left
at Howard Johnson's" helps them to control this feeling, and if it gets too
much for them they can always tell me that they have been left behind; then
I can do something about picking them up.

We must set a limit to the tension that we put children under. If we don't,
they will set their own limits by not paying attention, by fooling around, by
saying unnecessarily, "I don't get it." We should let them know in advance
that they will not have to be under tension for an entire period, and that, if
need be, they have the means to bring it to a stop.

Perhaps this is a reason why people like Gattegno, who go around teaching
demonstration math classes, get such spectacular results. The kids know that
this is not real school, that this strange man is not their teacher, that if they
make mistakes nothing serious will happen, and that, in any case, it will be
over soon. Thus freed from worrying, they are ready to use their brains. But
how can we run a class from day to day and keep that spirit? Can it be done
at all?

February 5, 1959

How it is possible for children of only ten to have such strongly developed
concepts of themselves, and these unfavorable almost to the point of self-
contempt and self-hatred? We expect this of older children; but that it should
have gone so far, so soon ...

Are there any of them who are so busy with the world and with living that
they just don't bother to think much about themselves? Perhaps Betty.
Perhaps Hal. Not many others.

Perhaps they are thrown too early, and too much, into a crowded society of
other children, where they have to think, not about the world, but about their
position in it.

I feel this now much more strongly than before.

Is it possible that our modern way of teaching, all gentleness,

persuasiveness, and human contact, tends to make children get themselves
and their work all mixed up? The first school I went to was very different
from this. Even when I was five, the teachers there never called me anything
but Holt. Of me, as a person, they seemed to take little notice. I didn't know
whether they liked me or not; it never occurred to me to wonder. My work
was what concerned them. If it was good, it was commended; if bad, it was
criticized. There may be more than we think in this old-fashioned way of
dealing with children. Maybe it was easier for children to grow up in a world
in which, when they impinged on the world of adults, they were treated
firmly, impersonally, and ceremoniously, but were otherwise left alone.

There was a word on Sam's report card that he could not understand; he
was almost in tears over it. Why should he have assumed that it was bad?
Of course, we adults tend to see all small, specific failures, of our own or of
children, as proof of general failure, incompetence, and worthlessness. Is it a
cultural matter? Are there no people in the world for whom it is not a
disgrace to do something badly?
 Note the danger of using a child's concept of himself to get him to do good
work. We say "You are the kind of sensible, smart, good, etc., etc. boy or
girl who can easily do this problem, if you try." But if the work fails, so does
the concept. If he can't do the problem, no matter how hard he tries, then,
clearly, he is not sensible, smart, or good.

If children worry so much about failure, might it not be because they rate
success too high and depend on it too much? May there not be altogether too
much praise for good work in the lower grades? If, when Johnny does good
work, we make him feel "good," may we not, without intending it, be
making him feel "bad" when he does bad work?

Do children really need so much praise? When a child, after a long

struggle, finally does the cube puzzle, does he need to be told that he has
done well? Doesn't he know, without being told, that he has accomplished
something? In fact, when we praise him, are we not perhaps horning in on
his accomplishment, stealing a little of his glory, edging our way into the
limelight, praising ourselves for having helped to turn out such a smart
child? Is not most adult praise of children a kind of self-praise? I think of
that marvelous composition that Nat wrote about the dining room in his
house. I find now, to my horror, that in thinking with satisfaction about that
comp, I am really congratulating myself for my part in it. What a clever boy
this is! And what a clever man am I for helping to make him so!

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 un-knowingly, 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 may- be 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' ever
more 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.

Some people are very unwilling to believe this. The other day, at a meeting
about home schooling, I met one such person, an official in some kind of
"service" agency, a professional defender of children and provider of
compulsory help. She was very angry at all my talk of giving children
responsibilities and rights, letting them do serious work--above all, letting
them stay home unattended. She insisted they didn't have the judgment to do
such things. To prove it she told me a story about her twelve-year-old
daughter. She told it in a very strange and contradictory tone of voice. On
the one hand, she seemed to be speaking more in sorrow than in anger--"I
wish i didn't have to say this, but I have to say it." On the other hand, her
voice was full of relish and triumph--"See, this proves that children can't be
trusted, but must always have people like me (for most people aren't
qualified) to look out for them."

The story was that one evening she had dinner cooking on and in the stove.
Suddenly she had to go out for a while, and told her daughter to watch the
dinner. Details here were vague; it wasn't clear whether she told her
daughter to turn off the stove at a certain time, or said that she would be
home in time to turn it off, or what. Anyway, when she returned home ten
minutes later (so she said), the dinner was burned, the whole house was full
of smoke, and heaven knows what other disasters had happened. The story
as told is a little hard to believe; if you overcook a dinner for ten minutes
you don't usually get a house full of smoke. "See," this woman kept saying
in her sorrowful but triumphant voice, "the poor girl did her best, but she's
just a child, she doesn't have the judgment." Having finally learned when
argument is useful and when it is not, I did not ask how much judgment it
takes to turn off a stove. Nor did I say, as I would have liked to, "Madam, I
don't know what kind of games you and your daughter are playing with each
other, or for what reasons, but I know of quite a few children half your
daughter's age who can and frequently do plan a meal, buy all the food, and
cook it."
 This deep lack of trust in children, this feeling that at any second they may
do something terribly stupid or destructive, has to some extent poisoned the
air of almost every kindergarten, nursery school, or day care center I have
seen-- and the people who have shown me these places have always thought
they were showing me the best. The people in charge, usually very pleasant,
kindly, and intelligent young women, are full of this kind of anxiety.
However much they might like to, they can never settle down to a relaxed,
calm, quiet conversation or game or project with one or two children, but
must always be darting nervous glances around the room to be sure that
everyone is doing something and that no one is doing something bad. The
result is that a child rarely ever gains the full attention of the adults; they are
always looking out of the corner of their eye at someone else. Their unease
tends to make all the children uneasy, even when they are on the whole
doing things they enjoy.

I have seen a great many of these groups of young children in the Public
Garden, nursery schools or day care centers out for a picnic or a ride on the
swan boats or just a frolic in the air and space and green grass. I almost
always take a few minutes to watch the children play. As I do I also look at
the adults in charge of these groups. Hardly any of them ever seem to be
getting any pleasure from being with the children. Most of them, in fact,
look angry, and are constantly saying to the children in sharp and
disagreeable voices, "Stand still, be quiet, don't run, stop that, stay close to
me." But even the few adults, who don't look mean and angry, seldom look
happy. They almost never give me the kind of sharing, conspiratorial look
that I often get from loving mothers who see me admiring and enjoying the
sight of their little children. The women in charge of these groups of
children are too worried about all the bad things that might happen to be able
to get any pleasure from their small companions. And yet, what could go
wrong? The street is far away, with a fence in between, and even if a child
made a dash for the street, which I have never seen one do, it wouldn't take
an adult more than a few steps to catch up.

It is not the ratio of children to adults in the group, but the total number of
children that seems to determine how anxious are the adults. In this respect
a group of thirty children attended by five adults is not at all like a group of
six children attended by one adult, for this reason, that in the large group
every one of the five adults worries about all thirty of the children. The
bigger the group, the more the worry, and no matter how many adults there
may be?
 If we could revive our one-room schools, with all ages mixed together,
competent teachers would not find it hard to manage schools of thirty
students. The younger children would learn from those a little older, and the
oldest of all, who would look like grownups to the little ones, could help
take care of them. But in our giant schools of a thousand or more students,
classes of thirty are indeed too big for all but a few teachers to work with. It
is schools rather than classes that we need to make smaller.

April 24, 1959

Strategy is an outgrowth of character. Children use the strategies they do

because of the way they feel, the expectations they have of the universe, the
way they evaluate themselves, the classroom, and the demands made on
them. Rachel sees the class as a place where she is told to do certain things,
praised if she does them right, disapproved of if she does not. She is not
likely to use good strategy no matter how much we press it on her. Even if I
give her problems which she must think about to solve, and even if she
thinks about them and solves them, which hardly ever happens, she will
make of this a kind of production strategy. She will say, as I think she does
say, that this is a crazy class and that this screwball is always giving her
funny kinds of problems to puzzle over; but she will not carry this way of
working on problems over into other work, or into the main part of her life.
Her first concern will still be self-defense.

One thing we see in our intelligent children is that they are intensely
involved with life. Rachel, Pat, Elaine, Garry, all are daydreamers. But
Barbara, Betty, Maria, Ralph, and Hal don't withdraw from life; they
embrace it. We spoke once of a love affair with learning. These children
seem to have a love affair with life. Think of the gusto with which Betty, or
Barbara, or Sam tell even the simplest story about themselves.

Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense.
They check their answers and their thoughts against common sense, while
other children, not expecting answers to make sense, not knowing what is
sense, see no point in checking, no way of checking. Yet the difference may
go deeper than this. It seems as if what we call intelligent children feel that
the universe can be trusted even when it does not seem to make any sense,
that even when you don't understand it you can be fairly sure that it is not
going to play dirty tricks on you. How close this is in spirit to the remark of
Einstein's, "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe."

On page 54 in the July 1958 Scientific American, in the article "Profile of

Creativity," there is the following apt comparison:

The creative scientist analyzes a problem slowly and

carefully, and then proceeds rapidly with a solution. The less
creative man is apt to flounder in disorganized attempts to get a
quick answer.

Indeed he is! How often have we seen our answer grabbers get into trouble.
The fact is that problems and answers are simply different ways of looking
at a relationship, a structure, and an order. A problem is a picture with a
piece missing; the answer is the missing piece. The children who take time
to see, and feel, and grip the problem, soon find that the answer is there. The
ones who get in trouble are the ones who see a problem as an order to start
running at top speed from a given starting point, in an unknown direction, to
an unknown destination. They dash after the answer before they have
considered the problem. What's their big hurry?

Here are Elaine, the answer grabber, and Barbara, the thinker, at work on
the problem 3/4 + 2/5, = ?

Elaine (adding tops and bottoms, as is her usual custom): Why not 5/9?

Barbara: 5/9 is less than 3/4. She saw that since 2/5 was added to 3/4, the
answer would have to be bigger than 3/4; so 5/9 could not be it. But this
went right over Elaine's head.

Elaine: Where's the 3/4?

Barbara: In the problem!

Yet I doubt that any amount of explaining could have made Elaine
understand what Barbara was saying, far less enable her to do the same kind
of thinking for herself.

The poor thinker dashes madly after an answer; the good thinker takes his
time and looks at the problem. Is the difference merely a matter of a skill in
thought, a technique which, with ingenuity and luck, we might teach and
train into children? I'm afraid not. The good thinker can take his time
because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. The poor
thinker can't stand not knowing; it drives him crazy.

This cannot be completely explained by the fear of being wrong. No doubt

this fear puts, say, Monica under heavy pressure; but Hal is under the same
pressure, and maybe I am as well. Monica is not alone in wanting to be right
and fearing to be wrong. What is involved here is another insecurity, the
insecurity of not having any answer to a problem. Monica wants the right
answer, yes; but what she wants, first of all, is an answer, any old answer,
and she will do almost anything to get some kind of answer. Once she gets
it, a large part of the pressure is off. Rachel was like this; so was Gerald, and
many others. They can't stand a problem without a solution, even if they
know that their solution will probably be wrong. This panicky search for
certainty, this inability to tolerate unanswered questions and unsolved
problems seems to lie at the heart of many problems of intelligence. But
what causes it?

Some might say here that this is all a matter for the psychiatrists. I am not
so sure. A person might well be distrustful in personal relationships and still
have a kind of intellectual confidence in the universe. Or is this possible?
And if so, can it be taught in school?

June 16, 1959

A year ago I was wondering how a child's fears might influence his
strategies. This year's work has told me. The strategies of most of these kids
have been consistently self-centered, self-protective, aimed above all else at
avoiding trouble, embarrassment, punishment, disapproval, or loss of status.
This is particularly true of the ones who have had a tough time in school.
When they get a problem, I can read their thoughts on their faces, I can
almost hear them, "Am I going to get this right? Probably not; what'll
happen to me when I get it wrong? Will the teacher get mad? Will the other
kids laugh at me? Will my mother and father hear about it? Will they keep
me back this year? Why am I so dumb?" And so on.

Even in the room periods, where I did all I could to make the work non
threatening, I was continually amazed and appalled to see the children
hedging their bets, covering their losses in advance, trying to fix things so
that whatever happened they could feel they had been right, or if wrong, no
more wrong than anyone else. "I think it will sort of balance." They are
fence straddlers, afraid ever to commit themselves--and at the age of ten.
Playing games like Twenty Questions, which one might have expected them
to play for fun, many of them were concerned only to put up a good front, to
look as if they knew what they were doing, whether they did or not.

These self-limiting and self-defeating strategies are dictated, above all

else, by fear. For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent
children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because
they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to
do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with
hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is
the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a
child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we
have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to
break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven
them.

What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is
so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children
when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what
the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs
of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and
gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that
most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very
scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and
adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference
between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are
almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared
fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor
learner.

Early in our work together Bill Hull once said to me, "We've got to be
interchangeable before this class." In other words, we mustn't appear to them
as the Bill Hull or John Holt we are, but only as whatever kind of teacher we
decided in our private talks, we will be. We soon learned that this could not
be done. We were very different people--in some ways, more different than
even we knew at the time--and we could not pretend to be the same unless
we pretended to be nobody.
 But a human being pretending to be nobody is a very frightening thing,
above all to the children. I think of a lovely story that a friend of mine told
me about her then four-year-old daughter. The house rule on weekends was
that when the children woke they could get up, but had to be quiet until
Mom woke up. One Sunday the mother was very tired and slept later than
usual. For a while the little girl was very good about being quiet. But as time
passed, and Mom's ordinary waking up time went by she began to feel more
and more the need for her mother's company. She began to make little
"accidental" noises; a toy dropped here, a, drawer shut a little too loudly
there. In time these noises woke the mother up. But she thought to herself
defiantly that if she just stayed in bed long enough, maybe in time the child
would give up and leave her alone. So she lay there pretending to sleep.

Finally the child could stand it no longer. She came to her mother's
bedside, and with a delicate thumb and forefinger very gently opened her
mother's nearest eye, looked into it, and said softly, "Are you in there?"

Children looking into our eyes do indeed want to know whether we are in
there. If we will not let them look in, or if looking in they see nobody there,
they are puzzled and frightened. With such adults around, children cannot
learn much about the world; they must spend most of their time and energy
thinking about the adults and wondering what they will do next.

There is a paradox here. Many of the adults who hide themselves from
children, pretending to be some idealized notion of "Teacher," might well
say they do this in order to make themselves consistent and predictable to
the children. The real me, they might say, is capricious, moody, up one day
and down the next. It's too hard for the children to have to deal with that
changeable, unpredictable real person. So instead, I will give them an
invented, rule-following, and therefore wholly predictable person. And it
works exactly backwards. Children, unless they are very unlucky, and live
at home with adults pretending to be model parents (which may be a
growing trend), are used to living with real, capricious, up-one-day and
down-the-next adults--and with their sharpness of observation and keenness
of mind, they learn how to predict these strange huge creatures, and to read
all their confusing signs.

They know the complicated emotional terrain of the adults they live with
as well as they know their room, their home, their backyard or street. But
trying to deal with adults who have tried to turn themselves into some kind
of machine is like trying to find your way in a dense fog, or like being blind.
The terrain is there, but you can't see it.

Later in the year, when the children and I had become very good friends,
one of them told me that she could always tell when I was starting to "get
mad." I asked how she knew. "Well," she said, wrinkling up her face as she
thought about it, "Your forehead gets kind of orange." Orange, I thought to
myself. Then I remembered that when my sister and I were about that age,
we could tell when our mother (who usually wore dark glasses) was angry
by looking at the skin on her forehead; it didn't change color, but it had a
kind of stretched, tight look about it that told us to watch out. By the time I
taught those fifth-graders I was bald, and my skin was very light and
sunburned very easily, so the children, with their sharp eyes, could see even
that very faint change of color that told them I was beginning to feel
annoyed.

Children can detect and understand these subtle human signs and signals
much better than they can figure out our rules--which half the time we don't
stick to anyway. When the children in a later fifth-grade class began to be so
noisy that it started to trouble me, one of them would very often say in
warning, "Look out, he's getting ready to put the Q up!"- the Q being my
signal for silence. They were hardly ever wrong. When they said that, I
could never keep from laughing. The sharp little rascals! But by the same
token they could usually tell, without my having to say anything, when I was
tired, or worried, or somehow out of sorts, and out of consideration more
than fear, they would make an effort to be quieter and less demanding than
usual.

August 12, 1959

This morning, near the end of the children's concert on the Esplanade, I
saw, sitting on my right about forty feet away, what looked like a retarded
child. Beside her sat her very attractive, suburban-looking mother, and
another woman. The child looked about thirteen, though it was hard to tell.
She was eating a sandwich, and drinking milk through a straw out of a half-
pint carton. Every so often she slowly, deliberately brought the sandwich up
to her mouth, took a bite, and chewed it as she lowered the sandwich to her
lap. Then she carefully raised the carton, centered the straw exactly, and
took a careful sip. One might have thought the carton-contained
nitroglycerine from her way of handling it. Frequently, she looked briefly
and silently at her mother, who was conversing with the other woman and
seemed to be paying no attention to her. I realized later that she was looking
to see whether what she was doing was all right.

What first struck me about this child, as so often is the case with seriously
retarded children, was the extraordinary ugliness of her face. Yet there was
nothing especially wrong with her features, except a kind of sick down
turning of the mouth. She could never have been called pretty, but her
features were normal and regular, and her coloring normal, though a bit pale
and unhealthy looking.

My shock, horror, and pity for her and her mother were so strong as to
block any thinking. I concentrated on watching without seeming to watch.
She was so intent on her milk and sandwich that she did not notice me. And
as I watched an interesting thing happened. The orchestra, which was
playing a piece that almost surely she did not know, reached the closing
bars, and as it did the girl put down her food, looked toward the orchestra,
and raised her hands as if ready to clap. A moment later the piece ended, and
hearing others clap, she began to clap.

The concert over, the conductor began to say the usual words, "We're glad
you've come. Come again next year, etc." and the girl, without changing the
ghastly expression on her face, raised her arm stiffly in what I realized after
a while was a gesture of good-bye. She seemed to be going through a ritual.
When people are leaving, you wave good-bye. This orchestra was leaving,
so she waved good-bye; but not because she was communicating something
to the orchestra, only because it was something that she had been trained to
do.

As the mother and friend continued to eat and chat, I moved to the shade
of a tree, where I could watch unobtrusively. Into my mind there came a
conversation I had recently had with a close friend, about the rightness or
wrongness of killing deformed children in infancy. He had said that he had
always thought he might leave a deformed baby with its face in a pillow, so
that its death might look like an accident. I asked whether he thought a wife
would ever agree to this, and we agreed that it is something a mother would
probably never do.
 Alas for innocence and ignorance. We now know that thousands, tens of
thousands of mothers, out of their own frustration and misery, have done and
keep on doing far worse things than this to children who are not deformed at
all.

At the same time, he felt that to keep such children alive was so terrible for
both mother and child that it would be better for the child to be dead.

This conversation, boiling up in my mind, crowded out any thinking about

the retarded girl; but after a while I began to think about her again. Why was
she so terrible to look at? What is so horrifying about mentally defective
children in general? Is it the contrast between what we think of as human
qualities and the lack of these qualities in someone of human shape? My
mind made a sentence, as if talking to someone: "We have to see someone
who is less than human to appreciate what it means to be human."

But then, I thought, there is nothing horrifying about the less than human,
about animals, for instance. I suddenly realized that what made this child
horrifying to see would have been equally horrifying in an animal. Have you
ever seen a dog perpetually scared out of his wits, tail curled between his
legs, always looking over his shoulder, slinking around, shying and leaping
at every noise? That, too, is horrifying. What made this child terrible to see
was not that she was less than fully human, but that she was less than fully
animal?

I have by now seen many more "retarded" children, and adults, and they
all had this same I dreadful expression of shame, anxiety, and fear.

When we say a child is retarded, what do we mean? Why, that she is

mentally and emotionally like much younger children. Yet only a look at the
younger children on the grass, listening, fooling around, dreaming, playing,
teasing, was enough to show that this poor child, though perhaps mentally
six or seven years old, was like no six-year-old, or three-year-old, who ever
lived.

About this time mother and friend got up, folded their blanket, and started
to walk across the grass in the opposite direction. As they passed the now
empty band shell, the girl again raised her arm in another stiff wave--and
then her mother gently reached up and drew her hand down again, and, lest
the child think this a rebuke, held her hand as they walked the rest of the
way across the grass. It seemed to me that she brought the girl's hand down
because to wave at an empty band shell was inappropriate, the kind of thing
a much younger child might do, might even be petted and admired for.

Let us say that retarded children are children who, for one reason or
another, are slower to learn the ropes, to pick up what their elders think is
appropriate behavior for their age. What must their home life be like? I have
a mental picture of the life of this child; I see her, hundreds and thousands of
times, doing something which is not bad, not wrong, but just inappropriate
for her age, and being told, gently or sorrowfully, not to do it. What
confusion in her mind! It is hard enough for children to learn to do and not
to do the things that are really necessary-- don't touch, don't run into the
street, don't go in the medicine cabinet, etc. If we add to this already long list
all the things that a retarded child would be told not to do "because you're
too old for that," it is easy to see how such a child's reasoning power and
faith in the world could break down altogether.

My point is that retarded children are made, not born. No; I daresay this
child really was retarded.

I now suspect that many "retarded" children are indeed made rather than
born. The process works like this: First, a child who is not following usual
paths or timetables of development is "diagnosed," which is to say labeled,
as being defective; secondly, the child is treated as if he or she were
defective--all in the name of care, treatment, therapy; thirdly, the child learns
to think of himself as defective; and finally, he more and more becomes
what the experts said he was.

Years ago I met a wonderful public elementary school teacher in western

New York State. Because there was no place else to put him, a boy who had
been labeled retarded had been put in one of her classes. The boy was
terribly neglected, underfed, and filthy dirty, in raggedy clothes, full of fear
and shame. This teacher found ways to take care of these physical needs.
Then she began to give the boy what he needed even more -- courteous
attention, physical contact, moral support. Under this kindly treatment, as so
often happens, the child, who had had virtually no school skills at all, did
five or so years worth of schoolwork in one year and caught up with the
class.
 At this point the teacher went to whoever was in charge of the boy's school
records, to get the "retarded" label taken off him. She showed them the
evidence that the child had done five or more years of schoolwork in one
year, and still other evidence of his intelligence and ability. She took it for
granted that the experts would join her in saying "Good! This child isn't
retarded, but very able; we're delighted to hear it; what wonderful news!
We'll change those records right away." Far from it. Their response was not
to defend and help the child it was their job to help, but to defend those other
experts whose judgment seemed to be challenged. They refused to take the
retarded label off the child. Over and over they said--this teacher spent more
than a year trying to remove that label--that she must have made some
mistake that whoever put the label on must have known what they were
doing.

The last thing this teacher told me was that the child's family was moving
to another city and school district, and that she had written and would keep
writing to the school authorities in that district, telling of the fine work the
child had done, so that they would not dump him back in retarded classes.
How it all came out, I don't know.

What puzzles me is, if IQ measures even roughly the rate at which we

learn, why a child with an IQ of 50 should not in time get to be a reasonably
normal and competent person. It is said that, in terms of what he knows and
can figure out, the average adult is not much beyond the level of the average
twelve-year-old. For all my skepticism about the measurement and testing of
intelligence, I think this reflects some kind of truth. Then why should not the
child with the IQ of 50 catch up with the crowd, more or less, by the time he
is twenty-five? What happens to him along the way to ensure that he will
never catch up?

I don't believe any longer that IQ "measures even roughly the rate at which
we learn." What it does is measure, roughly, the rate at which we learn
certain things--on the whole, things that upper-middle-class children tend to
learn and do. Beyond that, IQ tests measure our ability to solve certain kinds
of puzzles, usually symbolic and very limited in extent, in a short amount of
time. It does not test and never could test what Whitehead said was the most
important aspect of intelligence, the ability to ask good questions and to
know what questions were worth asking. Nor does it--nor could it--test the
ability to work at and eventually solve large and difficult problems over long
periods of time. Even when we set aside the heavy culture bias built into the
tests, they measure at best only a very narrow and trivial part of the wide
range of human intellectual abilities.

So when people tell me that a child is "retarded," I always ask, "How do

you know? What is the evidence?" I know one child who did not start
talking or walking until after he was three, and whose speech, until after he
was five, could hardly be understood except by his own family. Within a
very short time and without any special treatment he became a fluent and
skillful talker, and one of the most brilliant natural athletes I have ever
known.

Our mistake is at bottom a mistake of language. We take the word

"normal," meaning usual, what happens most of the time, and turn it into
proper, correct, desirable, what ought to happen all of the time.

What turned this particular child from a girl whose body was too big for
her behavior into a kind of monster of fear and tension that would make you
sick at heart to watch?

I thought that had she been acting like a normal, healthy child of half her
age, she would have been less distressing to watch. Then my mind's eye
conjured up a picture of her, romping around at the concert like a six-year-
old, and I sensed very vividly the horror that this inappropriate behavior
would arouse in all who saw it. So it may well be that the tension we see in
retarded children is caused, not so much by their being prevented from doing
things that to them seem perfectly natural, as by the horror and revulsion that
their inappropriate behavior arouses in all who see it, including, and perhaps
above all, their own parents. For we may be sure that, retarded or not, they
sense and understand these feelings, which are vastly more effective and
terrible than any punishment.

A great deal of the training of retarded children must be aimed at

concealing their condition, at making them look as if they were brighter than
they are. The child who is mentally six is obliged to play the role of a child
of twelve. Like the child this morning, whose entire attention was
concentrated on not spilling (who would care if a six-year-old spilled
something?), they have to think self-consciously about every single thing
they do. They must lead lives something like the heroes of stories of
impersonation, who, pretending to be someone else, must continually
remember to walk, talk, whistle, sing, scratch, move a certain way, always,
with detection, capture, and death the penalty for forgetting. The task must
be enough to break the spirit of all but the most practiced, disciplined, and
self-confident adult. Small wonder that it should be far too much for a child
who is untrained, fearful, and all too aware of the low opinion most people
have of him. Even the impersonator, the spy, gets a rest now and then; the
mentally six-year-old trying to act twelve hardly ever does. The picture is
almost too nightmarish to think about. Perhaps I exaggerate; but then,
remembering the fact of this child, I think not. It would take a living
nightmare to make that kind of haunted face.

If adult intolerance of behavior that to these kids seems natural makes

terrified monsters out of what began as merely slow children, what are we to
do? We have to draw some line between behavior approved and
disapproved, or how is the child to learn? But the great difference between
the normal child and the retarded child is that the former is punished for his
"bad" behavior; the latter may not be punished, but he is abhorred, which is
far worse.

Is it possible that such exaggerated adult reactions to children's

misbehavior may tend to make juvenile delinquents? The other day I was
walking across Boston Common when I saw two boys having a spitting
contest. This in itself would fall far outside the bounds of what most adults
would consider tolerable. Why are we so sensitive to spitting? It didn't
bother me that much, so I walked closer to see who was winning and to get
the reactions of other passers-by. Then the smaller boy began to do
something that overshot my bounds of the tolerable. He began to spit at the
other boy. He wasn't a very good shot, and didn't hit him; but it upset me. I
was further upset by his voice, which was loud, harsh, hoarse, and gravelly,
with the hysterical overtones of someone always on the edge of a fight. Then
they noticed me watching, and with one voice started saying, "Hey, mister,
gimme a nickel to ride home, etc." I wanted no more to do with them, and
walked away. I regret the reaction, but in the same case I would probably
react that way again.

There must be children, and this small boy might well be one of them,
who, being of stronger character than our poor retarded girl, react differently
to the shock and horror, which their behavior rouses in adults. Far from
making themselves sick with anxiety trying to avoid rousing this horror in
adults, these kids look for ways to rouse it. They recognize that their ability
to shock and horrify is a kind of power over other people.
 If strong disapproval of children's behavior mates neurotics at one end and
terrorists at the other, what should we do? Perhaps the answer is to give both
kinds of children things to use their human powers on that will be more
interesting than either their fears or the possibility of arousing fear in others.
Not that this will be easy to do; but it is where we should aim.

October 3, 1959

Yesterday, three young boys were riding the subway to Park Street. They
were exceedingly noisy, excited, and rude. They may not have been
"delinquents," but they looked as if they could have been, and certainly as if
they wanted the rest of us to think they were. The sudden contact with them
was shocking. They seemed so far from what we are used to in people, so
close to wild animals--but that is a libel on animals. It was hard not to feel
that there was no open door through which they could be reached. About
them in the car was an aura of stiff and anxious resentment, which they
seemed to recognize and enjoy. People were mentally drawing their skirts
and coattails aside.

As I watched these boys, I began to see them as they were. Each time one
of them said or did some thing to shock the people in the car, he looked
quickly and anxiously at the faces of his companions, to see whether he had
won their approval. Then it would be the turn of another to try to outdo him
in noisiness and rowdiness, and to look for his approval in turn. It was
suddenly clear that these boys were alone, anxious, frightened, and ready to
do anything, anything at all, that would, if only for a moment, gain them the
approval of their fellows. For their security they had nothing but each other,
and they were so anxious that they had almost no security to give. Every
time one of them laughed at another's joke, his laughter was almost instantly
cut short by the need to do something that would make the other laugh at
him. Their approval of each other almost instantly soured into jealousy.

What did these boys have to nourish their self-respect and self-esteem
besides the short-lived and uneasy approval they gave each other? Only the
palpable disapproval of everyone else around them, disapproval close to
fear. If you can't make people like you, it is something to be able to make
them afraid of you.
 Harrison Salisbury, in The Shook-Up Generation, and Warren Miller, in
The Cool World, describe, the former as reporter, the latter as novelist, the
world of the delinquent. It appears from what they say that even in the most
tightly knit street gangs there is little of what we could call friendship. Gang
members are no more than uneasy allies, welded together partly by fear of
the world outside and partly by the certain knowledge that nobody else in the
world gives a damn about them.

December 14, 1959

It often seemed last year as if Garry was deliberately turning back from the
world of success, which was strange to him, and which, though it offered
new and sweet rewards, might also contain hidden dangers, in favor of the
world of failure in which, even if he was not very happy, he was at least at
home. Today I saw, more clearly than ever before, why failure, unrelieved
and total, may seem to some students to be a promising strategy for school
and even for life.

Trudy is bright, has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and is more or less the
class screwball. Her schoolwork is very poor, by any standards, her spelling
perhaps worst of all. On her papers she spells worse than an average third-
grader. During the first part of the fall her spelling did not improve at all.
Finally, after many struggles and failures-everything I learn about teaching I
learn from the bad students-- I have come up with some ideas that seem to
help, even with the poor spellers.

When a child misspells a word on a paper, I print the word correctly with
Magic Marker on a 3 X 5 card. The children use these like a tachistoscope.
By moving a blank card quickly over the printed card, I gave them a split
second look at the word, then ask them to spell it. They can have as many
looks as they want; but each one is very short. This prevents them from
spelling the word aloud in their heads, and then trying to remember what
they "said." I want them to use their eyes to see what a word looks like, and
their mind's eye to remember what it looks like.

The bad spellers, of course, accumulate quite a stack of cards. I tell them
that if they spell one of these words correctly on a surprise test, I will
remove it from their cards. They all enjoy reducing their piles of spelling
cards, which seem to hang over their heads a little. Today I gave Trudy a
surprise test. It was a surprise for me; she got about twenty words right out
of twenty-five. What surprised me most of all, when she had finished this
good performance, was to see her looking, not pleased or satisfied, but
anxious. I thought, "Becoming a better speller presents risks to this child.
What on earth can they be?" And then I saw why for some children the
strategy of weakness, of incompetence, of impotence, may be a good one.
For, after all, if they (meaning we) know that you can't do anything, they
won't expect you to do anything, and they won't blame you or punish you for
not being able to do what you have been told to do. I could almost hear the
girl saying plaintively to herself, "I suppose he's going to expect me to spell
right all the time now, and he'll probably give me heck when I don't."

Children who depend heavily on adult approval may decide that, if they
can't have total success, their next-best bet is to have total failure. Perhaps,
in using the giving or withholding of approval as a way of making children
do what we want, we are helping to make these deliberate failures. I think of
a sixteen-year-old boy once knew who, unable to fulfill all his father's very
high expectations for him, decided to fulfill none of them. The father was a
pillar of the community, good at everything he did; the boy became a
playboy and a drunk. One night, at a party, the father was watching his son
doing a very drunken and quite funny tango alone in the middle of the dance
floor, before a laughing and admiring crowd. The thought flashed through
my mind, "Well, that's one thing he can do better than you can."

It is often said that alcoholics may be very able people who feel they
cannot meet the high standards they have set for themselves, and hence don't
try. Perhaps children find, or try to find, in hopeless incompetence the kind
of refuge that an alcoholic finds in liquor. But how do we get children to
kick the failure habit? Do we organize a society of Failures Anonymous?

Incompetence has one other advantage. Not only does it reduce what
others expect and demand of you, it reduces what you expect or even hope
for yourself. When you set out to fail, one thing is certain-you can't be
disappointed. As the old saying goes, you can't fall out of bed when you
sleep on the door.

January 3, 1960

Some people say that it is bad to read old-fashioned fairy tales to little
children, because they make them afraid. But even without fairy tales, the
lives of little children are full of fears. Like very primitive people, they live
in a world that they cannot begin to understand. Fairy tales could do for
small children, and indeed did for many years, what myth, ritual, and
religion did for primitive peoples--give their fears a name and an identity, a
handle to take hold of and perhaps to cast them out by. A child who can
channel his fear of the unknown into a fear of ghosts, witches, ogres, giants,
wicked fairies, and the like, may be able to rid himself of much of that fear
when he finds that such things do not exist. Even if not, he will have had
practice in dealing with fear, in facing and thinking about what he is afraid
of.

A small boy I knew, when he was about four, used to tell to any
sympathetic listener endless stories about his particular monster, which he
called a Mountain-Lion-Eater. I suppose he had begun with stories about a
mountain lion, that being the fiercest thing he could think of, and had later
learned enough about real mountain lions to feel that they were not large or
terrible enough to contain all the fear and terror that he wanted to put into
them. But something that ate mountain lions!--that might just fill the bill.
And this was no ordinary monster. He ate up not only mountain lions but
houses, neighborhoods, cities, even the whole world when he was in the
mood. In some stories, the little boy overcame the monster; in others, the
monster ate him up. It all depended on how he felt at the moment. In either
case, his private mythology did him a great service by enabling him in part
to see from outside and acknowledge his courage or his fear.

July 20, 1960

My seventeen-month-old niece caught sight of my ballpoint pen the other

day, and reached out for it. It has a plastic cap that fits over the point. She
took hold of it, and after some pushing and pulling, got the cap off. After
looking it over, she put it back on. Then off again, then on again. A good
game! Now, if I want to be able to use my pen, I have to keep it out of sight,
for when she sees it, she wants to play with it. She is so deft in putting it
back on that it makes me wonder about all I've read about the lack of
coordination in infants and the imprecision of their movements. Under the
right circumstances-when they are interested--they may be much more
skillful than we think.

These quiet summer days I spend many hours watching this baby. What
comes across most vividly is that she is a kind of scientist. She is always
observing and experimenting. She is hardly ever idle. Most of her waking
time she is intensely and purposefully active, soaking up experience and
trying to make sense out of it, trying to find how things around her behave,
and trying to make them behave as she wants them to.

In the face of what looks like unbroken failure, she is so persistent. Most
of her experiments, her efforts to predict and control her environment, don't
work. But she goes right on, not the least daunted. Perhaps this is because
there are no penalties attached to failure, except nature's usually, if you try to
step on a ball, you fall down. A baby does not react to failure as an adult
does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that
failure is shame, disgrace, a crime. Unlike her elders, she is not concerned
with protecting herself against everything that is not easy and familiar; she
reaches out to experience, she embraces life.

Watching this baby, it is hard to credit the popular notion that without
outside rewards and penalties children will not learn. There are some
rewards and penalties in her life; the adults approve of some things she does,
and disapprove of others. But most of the time she lives beyond praise or
blame, if only because most of her learning experiments are unobserved.
After all, who thinks about the meaning of what a baby is doing, so long as
she is quiet and contented? But watch a while and think about it, and you see
that she has a strong desire to make sense of the world around her. Her
learning gives her great satisfaction, whether anyone else notices it or not.

This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties,
or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative
reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat
children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true.
So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they
wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do
things, I wouldn't do anything."

It is the creed of a slave.

When people say that terrible thing about themselves, I say, "You may
believe that, but I don't believe it. You didn't feel that way about yourself
when you were little. Who taught you to feel that way?" To a large degree, it
was school. Do the schools teach this message by accident, or on purpose? I
don't know, and I don't think they know. They teach it because, believing it,
they can't help acting as if it were true.
 February 28, 1961

The unbelievable incompetence of some of the kids sometimes drives me

wild. They can't find anything. They have no paper or pencil when it's time
for work. Their desks are a mess. They lose library books. If they do
homework at home, they leave it there; if they take home material to do
homework, they leave the assignment at school. They can't keep their papers
in a notebook. Yet they are not stupid or incapable children; they do many
things well.

Ted is an intelligent, alert, curious, humorous, and attractive boy, with a

record of unbroken failure and frustration in school. He is an excellent
athlete, strong, quick, and well coordinated. But his school papers are as
torn, smudged, rumpled, and illegible as any I have ever seen. The other day
the class was cleaning out desks, and I was "helping" him. We got about a
ream of loose papers out of the desk, and I asked him to put them in the
notebook. As always, when he is under tension, his face began to get red.
He squirmed and fidgeted, and began to mutter. "They won't fit, the
notebook's the wrong size"-- which wasn't true. Finally he assembled a thick
stack of papers and began to try to jam them onto one of the rings in his
notebook, not noticing that the holes in the papers were at least a half-inch
from the ring. As he pushed and fumbled and muttered, I felt my blood
pressure rising until, exasperated almost to rage, I said loudly, "For heaven's
sake, leave it alone, do it later, I can't stand to watch any more of it!"

Thinking over this scene, and many others like it, I was suddenly reminded
of a movie, A Walk in the Sun, based on the novel by Harry Brown. It
showed the adventures of a leaderless platoon of infantry- men during the
first days of the invasion of Italy. At one point, while the platoon is moving
through some woods, they are surprised by an enemy light tank, which, amid
a good deal of confusion, they manage to ambush. When this action is over
the soldiers find that their sergeant, who has been growing rapidly more
anxious, and is clearly the victim of battle fatigue, has given way
completely. They find him hugging the ground, shaking all over, and
babbling incoherently. They leave him behind as they move inland toward
their vaguely conceived objective. One of the soldiers remarks as they go
that the sergeant has finally dug himself a foxhole that they can't get him out
of.
 It seems to me that children dig themselves similar foxholes in school, that
their fumbling incompetence is in many ways comparable to the psyche-
neurotic reactions of men who have been under too great a stress for too
long. Many will reject this comparison as being wildly exaggerated and
inappropriate. They are mistaken. There are very few children who do not
feel, during most of the time they are in school, an amount of fear, anxiety,
and tension that most adults would find intolerable. It is no coincidence at all
that in many of their worst nightmares adults find themselves back in school.
I was a successful student, yet now and then I have such nightmares myself.
In mine I am always going to a class from which, without the slightest
excuse, I have been absent for months. I know that I am hopelessly behind in
the work, and that my long absence is going to get me in serious trouble, of
what sort I am not sure. Yet 1 feel I cannot stay away any longer, I have to
go.

It is bad enough to be a teacher and feel that the children in your charge
are using the conscious and controlled parts of their minds in ways which, in
the long run and even in the short, are unprofitable, limiting, and self-
defeating to see them dutifully doing the assigned work and to be sure that
they are not getting a scrap of intellectual nourishment out of it; to know that
what they seem to have learned today they will have forgotten by next
month, or next week, or even tomorrow.

But it is a good deal worse to feel that many children are reacting to school
in ways that are not under their control at all. To feel that you are helping
make children less intelligent is bad enough, without having to wonder
whether you may be helping to make them neurotic as well.

March 2, 1961

A woman who has spent many years working with children with severe
learning blocks, children whom conventional schools, even in slow sections,
could not deal with at all, told a class of teachers the other day that early
investigators of children who could not read coined the term "word
blindness" to describe what they saw. There has been much talk about word
blindness since. The experts of the moment seem to believe that the cause is
neurological, that there is in a certain percentage of children something in
the organization and structure of the brain, which makes word recognition
difficult or impossible.
 Perhaps this is the cause of some reading problems, but that it is the only
or the most frequent cause is open to grave doubt. My own belief is that
blindness to patterns or symbols, such as words, is in most instances
emotional and psychological rather than neurological. It is a neurotic
reaction to too great stress. I have often experienced it myself.

The most severe case came during a flute lesson. I describe it in some
detail because the kind of tensions that are needed to bring about this loss of
the ability to see meaningfully are such that, except in time of war or
extreme danger, most adults are not likely to experience them.

The lesson was in the late afternoon. I had had a difficult and discouraging
day in class, followed by a tense and unpleasant committee meeting. I was
late in leaving, was delayed by heavy traffic, and arrived late for my lesson,
with no chance to warm up. My teacher had also had a trying day, and was
not his usual patient self. He was exasperated that I had made so little
progress since the previous lesson, and began, as exasperated teachers do, to
try by brute will power to force me to play the assigned passage as fast as he
thought I should be able to play it.

The pace was much too fast; I began to make mistakes; 1 wanted to stop,
but cowed by his determination, hesitated to make the suggestion. A feeling
of physical pressure built up in my head. It felt as if something inside were
trying to burst it open, but also as if something outside were pressing it in.
Some kind of noise, other than my miserable playing, was in my ears.
Suddenly I became totally note-blind. The written music before me lost all
meaning All meaning It is hard to describe what I felt. It lasted no more than
a second or two, only as long as it took me to stop playing and look away
from the music. I could see the notes, but it was as if I could not see them. It
is said of such moments that everything becomes a blur. This may have been
true; when to go on seeing clearly becomes unbearably painful, the eyes may
well refuse to focus. There was also an impression that the notes were
moving and shifting on the page. But above all else was the impression that,
whatever I was seeing, it was as if I had never seen such things before, never
heard of them, never imagined them. Any and all associations they might
have had for me were, for that instant, destroyed. They were completely
disconnected from all my previous experience.

These sensations were indescribably frightening and unpleasant. After a

second or two, I put down my flute and turned away from the music. My
teacher sensed that I had been driven over the edge of something, and after a
short rest, we went on at a more relaxed pace. But suppose I had been a
child? Suppose I had not been free, or felt free, to turn away? Suppose my
teacher had felt that it would be good for my character to force the pace
harder than ever?

Since the book first came out, a number of people, some of them
professional musicians have told me they have had the same experience.

And as 1 described in the early part of Never Too Late, I have often had it
myself, usually when trying to play my part in an orchestra going too fast for
me. In some way the mind is unable to see the notes in a way that can get
meaning from them. But also, to some extent the mind may be refusing to
see them.

During the seven and a half years in which I have been playing the cello, I
have been for the most part a very poor sight-reader. When I look at a new
piece of music, even a piece which I will soon be able to play, I can't just
play it the first time I look at it, not at any proper tempo. I have to figure out
what the notes are telling me to do with my hands.

I read music the way bad readers, or beginning readers, read print. This is
a strange and interesting experience for me, because I learned to read print
when very young, and could soon read fluently, almost without thinking
about it. Only in music do I know what it feels like to be a bad reader.

Musicians have said to me, as I say to readers of print, that the best way to
become a better reader is not to worry and to read more. It works. I am still
not a good sight-reader, but I am getting better.

Musicians also tell me not to read one note at a time, but to read groups of
notes, whole measures, phrases - the "words" of music. For a long time I
have tried to do this, but it has been very hard for me. I try to read groups of
notes, but I can't, 1 can only see one note at a time.
The other day I was reading through a string quartet I am working on, when
I noticed, to my great surprise and pleasure, that every so often I could see
several notes at once, sometimes even, if the notes were not too thick, a
whole measure. It was not a matter of trying to see them. I just saw them.
They were there. I couldn't see them before, now I can. What has happened?
 What I suspect has happened is that as my anxiety has gone down my
peripheral vision has gone up. I can see more things at once. Anxiety, fear,
tension seem to narrow the range of things I can see or attend to. I don't
know where this narrowing takes place, in the eye itself, at the retina,
whether it has something to do with the amount and complexity of
information that can be passed from the optic nerve to the brain, or whether
it has to do with how much of that information the brain can turn into
perception. But there seems to be good evidence that increasing anxiety
narrows that range.

George Leonard, writing about sports, made nice distinction between what
he called "hard" and "soft" vision. We use hard vision when we look at
something through a microscope, or telescope, or at a ball we are trying to
hit. We use soft vision to see what is going on over a large part of our field
of vision, like a basketball player (Leonard's example) who can see
everything happening on the court at once, or a quarterback who can see all
his receivers, instead of having to look first for one, then another, or a
broken field runner who can see everyone downfield who is coming at him,
and how fast they are coming, and from what angle. When people asked O.
J. Simpson how he "knew" how to make his brilliant open field runs, he
used to say, like all great running backs who are asked that question, that he
didn't know, he just saw everything and it was as if the path were laid out for
him.

This ability to take in and make use of a lot of information at once seems
to me a very high indicator of intelligence in the broadest sense. It led me to
say once, at a conference at which someone had made some sneering remark
about basketball players, that it probably took more real intelligence to play
good basketball than to write the average Ph.D. thesis. This produced a very
mixed reaction.

If we could find a way to raise and lower anxiety at will, and measure it
instantaneously, we could probably design experiments that would show that
the range of our attention narrows dramatically as we become more anxious.
In any event, I know that as I grow less anxious about reading music, my
range of attention is increasing.

The other thing my musical friends used to tell me to do was read ahead,
keep my eyes a little bit ahead of the notes that my hands are playing. When
reading print aloud I can easily do this; my eyes are always a little ahead of
my voice. But I haven't been able to do in music what I can easily do in
print.

There were two reasons for this, one obvious, the other less so. The
obvious reason was that every time I played a note the teacher or the mistake
corrector in my head would say "Are you sure that was the right note?" In
other words, I was always thinking about the note I had just played; instead
of the note I was about to play. Correcting that habit was mostly a matter of
being aware when I was doing it, and in learning ways (which I won't go
into here) to stop doing it.

But even when I was not, so to speak, looking behind the music, behind
the notes my hands were doing, I found it very hard to look ahead. Some of
this was anxiety, which made it impossible to have two thoughts in my head
at once. But there was something else that I only discovered a few weeks
ago. Reading a new piece of music, a hard piece for me, I became aware that
my eyes were glued to the note I was playing. I made a conscious effort to
look a little bit ahead, but found it very difficult; it roused a lot of anxiety. I
examined my own thoughts and feelings about this. I found two things. First,
I was afraid that if I looked away from the note I was playing I would not be
able to Find it again, would be "lost," would have to send my eyes all over
the music on a frantic search for my place.

This feeling, that if I took my eyes off the note I could not find it again, led
to an even stranger and more irrational feeling, that the note was actually
trying to get out from under my eye, that if I did not, so to speak, pin the note
to the paper with my eye, it would get away. I was so astonished to discover
this feeling that I laughed out loud. Ridiculous to think such a thing! But I
could tell that I really had thought it from the great relief, pleasure, and
excitement that I felt when I discovered it.

Now, knowing this, if I catch myself trying to pin notes to the paper with
my eye, I say to myself, "Come on, that's just ink on the page, it isn't going
to move." To the extent that I can really convince myself that I can take my
eyes off the note and then go back and find it right where I left it, I can make
my vision a lot softer. Now and then I can do something, did it last night
while working on the Dvorak "American," as a matter of fact, that I would
not have dared try to do or been able to do only a little while ago. Seeing a
number of measures ahead that were obviously all alike, I looked to the end
of them to see what came near. I felt as I did it that I was taking a small risk.
But it worked; at the slow tempo at which I was playing, I could actually
play one thing and look ahead to another.

I mention all this only to make the point that bad readers of print almost
certainly have a similar feeling, that if they take their eye off the word, even
the very letter that they are looking at, it will jump out from under their eye,
somehow escape from the page, and they will never be able to find it again.
These feelings must be all the more severe in children who are made to read
aloud in front of others, and who are scolded or made terrible fun of by the
other children and the teacher if they lose their place.

It is good practice for me to read my cello part while listening to a

recording of the same music. I can practice looking away from the note
being played and then looking back to it. In the same way, it might be very
helpful to many children if they could, as (thanks to cassettes) many of them
do, hear a book being read aloud while they look at the same book
themselves.

This is of course one of the things that happens when parents read aloud to
little children, holding them on their laps or close beside them. Some of the
time, children no doubt follow word by word the words they are hearing. But
at other times their eyes wander, they look ahead, look even to the end of the
page to see how far away it is, and then look and find the "right" place
again. And so, without knowing that they are doing it, they learn an
important skill of reading, and one which could not be learned in any
situation where much anxiety was present

March 5, 1961

Some people say of nonreaders, "These children can't or don't read because
of the way they use their minds." Others retort, "No; they don't read because
of the kind of minds they have." The argument seems to me unreal as well as
useless. The distinction between what our minds are and how we use them is
one that exists only for purposes of talk; it does not exist at the level of
reality. The mind is not a kind of thinking machine that someone or
something inside of us uses, well or badly. It is; and it works, perhaps well,
perhaps badly; and the way it works one time has much to do with the way it
will work another time.
 Religious mystics in India, so we are told, stand for many years with an
arm raised, or a limb distorted or immobilized in some fashion. After a while
the limb becomes unusable. What sense does it make to argue whether the
cause of this is physical, or lies in the way the limb was used? It was the way
it was used that made it the kind of Limb it was, a limb that could not be
used any other way. It is probably true of the mind as well, that the way we
use it determines how we can use it. If we use it badly long enough, it will
become less and less possible to use it well. If we use it well, the possibility
grows that we may use it even better. We must be wary, then, of assuming
that because some learning difficulties seem to be caused by brain
dysfunction they are therefore incurable. The brain, as an organ, may have
far more flexibility and recuperative powers than we realize. What it cannot
accomplish one way it may be able to do another. Conversely, we must be
aware of the extent to which, in causing children to make poor use of their
minds, we may be making their minds less and less useful to them.

March 21, 1961

Today Andy had a long, tough session with me. He finally solved the
problem I had given him. But I can't help wondering what he learned. Not
much; he certainly didn't gain any insight into the property of multiplication
in which I was interested. All that he had to show for his time was the
memory of a long and painful experience, full of failure, frustration, anxiety,
and tension. He did not even feel satisfaction when he had done the problem
correctly, only relief at not having to think about it anymore.

He is not stupid. In spite of his nervousness and anxiety, he is curious

about some things, bright, enthusiastic, perceptive, and in his writing highly
imaginative. But he is, literally, scared out of his wits. He cannot learn math
because his mind moves so slowly from one thought to another that the
connections between them are lost. His memory does not hold what he
learns, above all else because he won't trust it. Every day he must figure out,
all over again, that 9 + 7 = 16, because how can he be sure that it has not
changed, or that he has not made another in an endless series of mistakes?
How can you trust any of your own thoughts when so many of them have
proved to be wrong?

I can see no kind of life for him unless he can break out of the circle of
failure, discouragement, and fear in which he is trapped. But I can't see how
he is going to break out. Worst of all, I'm not sure that we, his elders, really
want him to break out. It is no accident that this boy is afraid. We have made
him afraid, consciously, deliberately, so that we might more easily control
his behavior and get him to do whatever we wanted him to do.

I am horrified to realize how much I myself use fear and anxiety as

instruments of control. I think, or at least hope, that the kids in my class are
somewhat more free of fear than they have been in previous classes, or than
most children are in most classes. I try to use a minimum of controls and
pressures. Still, the work must be done-mustn't it? --And there must be some
limits to what they can be allowed to do in class, and the methods I use for
getting the work done and controlling the behavior rest ultimately on fear,
fear of getting in wrong with me, or the school, or their parents.

Here is Andy, whose fears make him almost incapable of most kinds of
constructive thinking and working. On the one hand, I try to dissipate those
fears. But on the other, I have to do something to get him to do the work he
so hates doing. What I do boils down to a series of penalties, which are
effective in exactly the proportion that they rouse the kind of fears that I
have been trying to dispel. Also, when children feel a little relieved of the
yoke of anxiety that they are so used to bearing, they behave just like other
people freed from yokes, like prisoners released, like victors in a revolution,
like small-town businessmen on American Legion conventions. They cut up;
they get bold and sassy; they may for a while try to give a hard time to those
adults who for so long have been giving them a hard time. So, to keep him in
his place, to please the school and his parents, I have to make him fearful
again. The freedom from fear that I try to give with one hand I almost
instantly take away with the other.

What sense does this make?

REAL LEARNING

April 22, 1958

Memo to the Math Committee:

We tell children here to think about the meaning of what they are doing.
We say this is the sure way to the right answer. But it may lead instead into
one of the paradoxes and contradictions of which elementary math is full. In
such cases the student who thinks, as I used to, "Oh, well, I'II just do what
they tell me, and not worry about it," can often move on without difficulty,
while the one who thinks hard about what he is doing can get into a tangle
from which neither he nor his teachers may be able to free him.

One of the fifth-grade groups was trying to discover how to divide by

Fractions. They had been given, to figure out for themselves if they could,
"Divide 6 by 1/2." The children know the official school definition of
division, that "8 divided by 4" means either "How many 4's are contained in
8?" or "If you separate 8 into 4 equal parts, how many will be in each part?"
Most of the group applied the first meaning of division to the problem,
taking it to mean, "How many ½’s are contained in 6?" They saw that the
answer was 12. But two girls, who had done excellent thinking about
multiplying fractions only a few days before, tried to apply the other
meaning of division, and asked themselves: "If you divide 6 into halves, how
big will each half be?" Quite reasonably, they got the answer 3.

It was their good thinking, and my bad, that got them into difficulty. I had
not told them that the second of the two meanings of division did not apply,
and was in fact without meaning in the case of division by a fraction. The
reason I had not told them is that I had not realized it myself. Since I had
given them the rule, they felt that it must make sense, and in fact twisted it to
make sense in the only way it could be made to make sense. Six divided into
half a part could only mean six divided into halves.

My misuse of language reinforced their misunderstanding. Like most

people, I frequently use the word "divide" in a way that contradicts its
mathematical meaning. We say: "Divide a pie into four parts" when all we
are really doing is making two perpendicular cuts through the center of the
pie; we say, "Divide a line into two parts," when what we mean is to find the
midpoint of the line; we talk about dividing something in half when it would
be more consistent to talk about dividing it in two. For all these reasons it
was natural for these girls to suppose that dividing 6 by l/2 meant dividing it
into halves, or two parts.

One able boy unwittingly increased their confusion. Early in the period he
explained at the blackboard that the problem was asking how many l/2’s
were contained in 6, and showed with a good diagram that the answer was
12. Then he made a mistake that many adults might easily have made. He
said, "Twelve what?" Then, after a second's thought, he answered, "Twelve
halves," and wrote 12/2 on the board. He soon saw his mistake, and
corrected it; but too late to save the girls. They had seen a leading member
of the opposition go to the board, and using the other meaning of division,
prove that 6 divided by 1/2 is 12/2, or 6. Since this was nonsense, they were
all the more convinced that their own answer was right.

Other children began to try to show the girls where they had gone wrong,
but without success. To rescue a man lost in the woods, you must get to
where he is. The other children could not get to where these girls were,
could not see how they had arrived at their answer, and hence could not help
them. All they could do, like most teachers, was repeat over and over again
how they got their own answer--which was no help at all. One boy asked one
of the girls to work out 6 X 1/2 on the board. She wrote, "6 X 1/2 = 3." He
then pointed out that they had just said that 6 divided by 1/2 equaled 3. The
girl looked at her partner and said, "We've been tricked!" I wonder how
often we, their teachers, make them feel this way.

Here one girl began to feel that the answer 3 was somehow wrong, and
whispered to her partner, "We goofed." Later she said, "One half of 6 is the
same as multiplication." She still could not see clearly that what she was
doing was multiplying, not dividing. Finally, after much further argument,
she said to her partner, "We may as well give in. Half of 6 is 12. 1 don't get
it, but it is."

These words threw a sharp light on the world of school as seen through the
eyes of children. How much of my teaching has been accepted by the
children in just this spirit? What I tell a child may seem to contradict his
common sense, the common usage of English, and even other things I have
told him; but he must bow to superior force and accept it whether it makes
sense or not.

I was finally able to get the girls out of their jam, and admitted my own
responsibility for getting them into it. But I had been thinking and talking for
some weeks about possible contradictions in my own teaching, and so was
particularly sensitive to it. This incident shows that we teachers must begin
to try to look at our ideas and our teaching through the eyes of someone who
knows nothing, can accept nothing unproven, and cannot tolerate
inconsistency and paradox. We must try to free our teaching from ambiguity,
confusion, and self-contradiction. Since to bring clarity and consistency to
"elementary" mathematics is one of the central mathematical problems of
our time, this task will not be easy.
 July 28, 1958

One day, some years ago, some friends said, "Ever seen any silicone
putty?" I said I had never even heard of it. They gave me a lump. I kneaded
it, flattened it, stretched it into a long thin piece, tore it into smaller pieces.
Then they said, "Roll it into a ball, and throw it on the floor." I did so. My
eye, and my brain, and my very bones knew what would happen--the putty
would splat on the floor and stick. I threw it, and while my eye, so to speak,
stayed stuck to the door the putty bounced up as high as my head. For an
awful split second, the universe rocked around me. I was on the brink of
terror. Then, in this same instant, something wrenched in my mind,
something said, "Okay, so it bounces, very funny, what'll they think of
next?" And I was back in the world of order and reason.

This makes me think of the little girl--first-grader? Second-grader?-who

burst into tears the other day when her teacher told the class how to spell
"once." The teacher probably assumed that the child cried because the word
was so hard. The chances are that she cried because the word was so crazy,
because it smashed into pieces the understanding that she had been carefully
building up in her mind about the way words are spelled. Even then, she
could probably have lived with this crazy word if only the teacher had
troubled to point out that it was crazy. What really makes school hard for
thinkers is not just that teachers say so much that doesn't make sense, but
that they say it in exactly the way they say things that are sensible, so that
the child comes to feel--as he is intended to-that when he doesn't understand
it is his fault.

What seems simple, natural, and self-evident to us may not seem so to a

child. Take, for example, the numeral 10. We are so used to it that we cannot
imagine what it might be like, knowing what 1 and 0 stand for, to be told
that when you put them together it stands for something much bigger than
either of them. We should acknowledge the obvious nuttiness of this when
we first present this numeral to children, so that they will not feel on the
outside of a baffling mystery. Otherwise this first encounter with 10 may
give children a shock from which they never fully recover, and which
freezes up their minds every time they think about it.

But children who are teaching themselves how to read, as many do, do not
burst into tears when they see the word "once," or any one of hundreds of
other words that don't sound the way they look. Children who are learning
on their own, learning what interests them, don't get all upset every time
they meet something unusual or strange. To young children, everything is
strange. They may think and fantasize a great deal about what they do not
understand, but they worry about it very little. It is only when other people,
adults, start trying to control their learning and force their understanding that
they begin to worry about not understanding, because they know that if they
don't understand, sooner or later they are going to be in some kind of trouble
with those adults.

In the same way, children will not be shocked and frightened by the
nuttiness, the paradox of the numeral 10, if they are free to get to know that
numeral 10 as they might get to know another child--seeing as much of 10 as
they want, thinking about it only when they want. One day they will know
10, it will suddenly stop seeming strange, and they may wonder why they
ever thought it was strange.

Nobody "explained" 10, or the function of base and place in our numeral
systems, when I was little. 1 went to a very old-fashioned school where they
just showed you how to do problems without ever trying to explain why they
did them that way, or to convince you that this made any sense. This was
probably hard on the children who weren't very good at parroting. But I was
great at parroting, and the advantage for me of this system was that I was left
alone to make sense of 10, and a lot of other things, in my own time and my
own way.

Bad explanations are a great deal worse than no explanations at all.

November 13, 1958

Kids have trouble with arithmetic, not only because they have to memorize
a host of facts that seem to have no pattern, meaning, or interest, but also
because they are given a host of rules for manipulating these facts, which
they have to take on faith. I don't continually have to check my arithmetic
operations against the world of numbers, because I have proved to my
satisfaction that the rules for manipulating numerals have their roots in the
world of real quantities and really work there. I know I can safely use the
conventional method to multiply 24 X 36 because I know that this means the
same thing as (20 X 30) + (4 X 30) + (20 X 6) + (4 x 6). But if I didn't know
that this was true, what sense would the conventional system of
multiplication make? How could I feel that this mysterious business of
"bringing down the zero" and "moving the next line over" would give me the
right answer? How could I ever check it against reality and common sense?

The beauty of the Cuisenaire rods [See footnote 1] is not only that they
enable the child to discover, by himself, how to carry out certain operations,
but also that they enable him to satisfy himself that these operations really
work, really describe what happens.

"The beauty of the rods. ." I am very skeptical of this now. Bill and I were
excited about the rods because we could see strong connections between the
world of rods and the world of numbers. We therefore assumed that
children, looking at the rods and doing things with them, could see how the
world of numbers and numerical operations worked. The trouble with this
theory was that Bill and I already knew how the world of numbers worked.
We could say, "Oh, the rods behave just the way numbers do." But if we
hadn't known how numbers behaved, would looking at the rods have
enabled us to find out? Maybe so, maybe not. Clearly they helped some
children, in our classes and elsewhere. Clearly they did not help many
others, just as clearly, many or most of the teachers who at one time or
another tried to use the rods did not understand them or use them well. The
rods had not made the world of numbers and operations with numbers clear
to them; naturally they could not use the rods to make these things clear to
their students.

November 26, 1958

Do the Cuisenaire rods give us as much control over bad strategy as we

like to think? Is there not a chance that some of the strategists may not still
be slipping something over on us? I imagine a student, like our old friend
Emily. I say, "What is the 3 of the 4?" 'Three-fourths. " "What is the four of
the three?" "Four thirds." "What is the 4 of the 5?" "Four fifths." What is
the 5 of the 4?" "Five fourths." Sure, I ask children to look at the rods as
they do this. But do the rods themselves determine the answer? Might not
the students be playing a word- shoving game with us? Suppose I said to
Emily, "What is the blip of the blop?" Might she not answer, "Blip
blopths"? "What is the blop of the blip?" "Blop blipths." Isn't this a perfectly
good strategy? It gives right answers. I suspect that Caroline and Monica are
doing just this, and I heard Gil say the other day something about "You take
the one that comes first..." Merely telling them to hold on to the rods and
look at them will not frustrate this strategy.

One way of dealing with these strategists is to vary the form of our
questions. We might hold up a yellow (5) rod and say, "If this is 1, show me
3/5"; or "If this is 2, show me 4." Such questions might test more fully
whether they were really seeing the rods and their relationships.

Isn't there something to be said for asking, whenever possible, questions

that can be answered without words? Questions that can be answered by
doing something, showing us something?

"Questions that can be answered..." This was not a bad idea as far as it
went, but it did not go far enough. Asking children questions that required
them to do something, rather than merely say something, was still no
improvement if, having tried to do what we asked, they still had to depend
on us to tell them whether they had done it right. What we needed were tasks
with an evident goal, like put ties--unlock the rings, make the ball go in the
hole, etc. No one ever asks, "Have I done this jigsaw puzzle right?"

I'll say more about this later when I talk about the Math Laboratory.

December 6, 1958

Observing in Bill Hull's Class:

The other day you were doing that business with the kids in which you
hold up two rods and ask what one is of the other. I noticed after a while that
you always asked, first, what the small one was of the large. The children
answered with a fraction in which the smaller number was the numerator. I
noticed then that if you paused, or looked doubtful, or repeated the question,
some of them quickly reversed their answer. If they had said five sevenths,
they then said seven fifths. Three people did this: Rachel, one of the boys,
and Barbara.

It was Barbara who really made the dent on me, because she is usually
such a thoughtful and capable student. You held up the black (7) and the
blue (9) and, reversing your previous procedure, said, "What is the blue of
the black?" She said, "Seven ninths." You hesitated. Her face got red; she
stared at you, not at the rods, for a second and then said, "Nine sevenths."
Nothing in her face, voice, or manner gave me the feeling that she had the
slightest idea why the first answer was wrong and the second right, or even
that she was sure that the second was right. If she is not sure, I don't like to
think about the others.

We want the rods to turn the mumbo-jumbo of arithmetic into sense. The
danger is that the mumbo-jumbo may engulf the rods instead. It doesn't do
any good to tell Monica to look at the rods if she doesn't believe that when
she looks she will find the answer there. She will only have two mysteries to
contend with instead of one.

December 7, 1958

One day in math class I was trying to make the point that division is not
just a trick that we carry out with numerals, but an operation that could be
done even by someone who didn't know any numerals. I asked the children
to suppose that they had a large bag of marbles, which they wanted to divide
as evenly as possible among four people, and furthermore that they had no
way of counting them. Most of the children realized that by giving out a
marble at a time to each person in turn until all the marbles were gone they
could do the job. But Pat and one other kid had a different idea. Here is Pat's
paper.

You could measure the bag with a ruler, and say it measures to be 8 so
then you would measure 2 inches of the bag for each one because there are
four people and 2 X 4 is 8 so you measure four 2 inch marks and then you
could cut on each 2 inch line like this [small picture here of a bag of marbles
with four lines going down it, evenly spaced] and give each person as much
as from one 2 inch line to another.

The other one said the same thing in different words. One at a time, I
spoke to them. To each I said, "Imagine that I have a big bag of marbles in
my hand" (business of showing, by gestures, what a large, heavy bag of
marbles would look and feel like). Then I said, "Now in this other hand I
have some scissors" (imitation of scissors). "Now I hold the bag in this hand,
and I bring the scissors over, and I start cutting this bag in half (gesturing of
cutting); what is going to happen?" At this point Pat said "Oh!" the other
child laughed. Then they both said that the marbles would go all over the
floor. Only then did they realize that their answer to the problem of dividing
up the marbles didn't make any sense.
 But of course if those children had had in real life the problem of dividing
up a bag of marbles among four people, they never would have been so
stupid as to try to cut the bag in four parts. Only in school did they think like
that.

This brings to mind something that happened when I was in prep school. A
friend was studying for a chemistry test. He was trying to memorize which
of a list of salts were soluble in water. Going through the list, he said that
calcium carbonate was soluble. I asked him to name some common
materials made of calcium carbonate. He named limestone, granite, and
marble. I asked, "Do you often see these things dissolving in the rain?" He
had never thought of that. Between what he was studying for chemistry and
the real world, the world of his senses and common sense, there was no
connection.

February 6, 1959

I have a hunch. Suppose we ask the children to draw two lines, one of
them five sevenths of the other. They will probably draw a 5-inch and a 7-
inch line. But then suppose we ask them to draw two more lines, one of
them five seventeenths of the other. I wonder how many of them will come
up after a while and say it can't be done, because they can't get a 17-inch line
on their paper.[2]

Perhaps we can say of understanding that the better we understand

something, the more places we can use it. If so, then one way to get children
to understand fractions may be to think of as many ways as possible to have
them use fractions.

I feel myself beginning to understand the difference between fractions as

quantities and fractions as operators. The expression 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6 can
mean that 1/2 of 1, plus 1/3 of 1, equals 5/6 of 1. Or it may mean that 1/2 of
something, plus 1/3 of that same thing, equals 5/6 of that same thing,
whatever the thing is.

But wait a minute. Are not all numbers operators? When we say 2 + 3 = 5,
do we not mean that 2 something's plus 3 something's equal 5 of those
things? In short, when we teach arithmetic, are we not always teaching
algebra whether we know it or not? And may not some of our difficulties
and confusions arise from the fact that we don't know it, are not aware of it?
When we write 2 + 2 = 4, what we really mean is 2x + 2x = 4x.

We are used to the idea that we cannot add fractions unless we have
common denominators. But this is true of whole numbers as well. Example:
2 horses + 3 horses = 5 horses; but 2 horses + 3 freight trains = what? 5
objects, 5 things, perhaps. But then, we have given horses and freight trains
the common denominator, objects. [3]

I have long suspected that there is more to this business of "understanding"

arithmetic than meets the eye, and I am just now beginning to get an inkling
of how much more. There is nothing particularly simple about "simple"
arithmetic. The idea that any nice, sympathetic woman can, without further
thought, teach children to "understand" arithmetic is just plain foolish.

We soon found out that the idea that people with Ph.D.'s in mathematics
could teach children to "understand" arithmetic turned out to be just as
foolish. Here and there the professor-led revolution in math teaching turned
up a few small good ideas. For the most part, though, it did little to improve
the teaching of mathematics and in many places may have made it worse.

I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything,

that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts, to
have a model of the structure in one's mind. We can give other people
names, and lists, but we cannot give them our mental structures; they must
build their own. Many people claim that any field of knowledge or
experience can be turned into a series of questions and answers-programmed
learning. An eleventh-grader who had been taught a year or two of
programmed math pointed out to me one day, with more insight than he
perhaps realized, the flaw in that method: "If people give me the questions I
can remember most of the answers, but I can never remember the questions."
Exactly.

March 8, 1959

The doctrine of this school seems to be that if children make pictures to

illustrate their work with fractions, they will understand what they are doing
and will not make mistakes. The other day I saw an interesting example of
this theory in operation. Pat had the problem 1/2 + 1/3 =? She thought about
it for a while, then drew two rectangles, each divided in thirds. She shaded
two sections of one rectangle, and wrote, "This is l/2." Then she shaded one
section of the other, and wrote, "This is 1/3." She looked at them a bit; then
she wrote "1/2 + 1/3 = 1 whole." And she sat back with a pleased and
satisfied look on her face.

Hester wrote, "1/2 + 1/3 = ¾." Barbara, sitting next to her, instantly said,
"No! 1/3 isn't the same as ¼." It took me a second or two to see what she
meant. Since l/2 + 1/4 = 3/4, 1/2 + 1/3 cannot equal 3/4. This child looks at
everything she does from several different angles to see whether it fits
together and makes sense. But how rare, how very rare she is.

I asked Monica the other day how many thirds were in one whole. She
said, "It depends on how big the whole is." If we could look into the minds
of our students, in how many would we find that thought? They know it is
wrong and mustn't be said; but how many think it in silence?

Sometimes Pat is in touch with the real world. I asked her, "Would you
rather have one third or one fourth of something to eat?" She said in a flash,
"Depends what it is."

Right after vacation, I gave everyone in the afternoon section rods and
asked them to figure out what 1/2+ 1/3 would be. I don't remember giving
them any hints; I'm almost sure I did not. Most of the class, without hints,
shuffled the rods around until they found or made a 6-cm or 12-cm length,
found half of it and a third of it, added them, and gave me the answer 5/6. I
am almost afraid to try it again. Some of them might be able to do this
without the rods; most of them, not.

Betty said, "2/4 + 3/5 is 1 or more. You need two more fifths to make 1,
and 2/4 is more than 2/5, so the answer must be bigger than 1." A
remarkable kid. And yet, in a conventional school, she might have been
considered a "slow" pupil, and might have become one [4]. She likes to look
at things from several angles, to consider the meaning, or meanings of what
she is doing before she does it. But on the whole, this is not the way to get
ahead in school.

Later she asked someone, "What's a third of 20 – without any halves?"

Still later, they were working on 1/2 + 1/4, and I heard these remarks:
 Ralph: It's 3/4, and don't ask us how we did it.

Gil: Add 1 and 1 and you get 3?

Betty: I'm not doing it that way, I'm doing it the way.

Later, working on 1/5 + 3/10:

Betty: Answer is 5/10 or 1/2.

Gil: But 5 isn't half of 10 and 10 isn't half of 3.

Jane said thoughtfully to herself, "Eight goes into 24 three times. Three
goes into 24 how many times?" It took her a long time to figure this out.

Incidentally, in spite of the school crusade against "goes into," all the
children say it, without exception.

April 24, 1959

If children come to feel that the universe does not make sense, it may be
because the language we use to talk about it does not seem to make sense, or
at least because there are contradictions between the universe as we
experience it and as we talk about it.

One of the main things we try to do in school is to give children a tool--

language--with which to learn, think, and talk about the world they live in.
Or rather, we try to help them refine the tool they already have. We act as if
we thought this tool of language were perfect, and children had only to learn
to use it correctly--i.e., as we do. In fact, it is in many ways a most imperfect
tool. If we were more aware of its imperfections, of the many ways in which
it does not fit the universe it attempts to describe, of the paradoxes and
contradictions built into it, then we could warn the children, help them see
where words and experience did not fit together, and perhaps show them
ways of using language that would to some extent rise above its limitations.

Look at adjectives--some are, so to speak, absolute: round, blue, green,

square. But many others are relative: long, short, thin, thick, heavy, light,
high, low, near, far, easy, hard, loud, soft, hot, cold. None of these have any
absolute meaning. Long and short only mean longer and shorter than
something else. But we use these words as if they were absolutes. In fact,
there must be many times when a child hears a particular thing called long
one day and short the next, or hot one day and cold the next. We use words
as if they were fixed in meaning, but we keep changing the meanings. The
soup that has become cold is still too hot for the baby. The short pencil today
is the long pencil tomorrow. The big kitty's name is Midnight; but don't be
rough with him, he's too little. Horses are big animals; see the little horsie
(three times the size of the child). How big you've grown; you can't have
that, you're too little. Children adjust to this kind of confusion; but is it an
intellectually healthy and useful adjustment, or just a kind of production
strategy? Would it be useful to talk to first-graders about why we call a
certain mountain small and a certain kitten big? Or is this easy stuff for
them?

The conventional teaching of grammar adds to the confusion. We talk

about, and use, nouns and adjectives as if they were very different, but in
fact they are often very much alike. A green ball, a green top, a green
bicycle, and a green stuffed animal are alike in that they are green
(adjective) and that they are toys (noun). When we call them green, we mean
they are members of a class that have in common the color green. When we
call them toys we mean that they are members of a class that have in
common the fact that children play with them. Why should a child be
expected to feel that there is something very different about these classes?
Why is the greenness of a ball different from the ball ness of a ball? I don't
feel the difference. They are both ways of saying something about the
object. We tell children that the distinction between one part of speech and
another is a matter of meaning, when it really has to do with the way we fit
them into sentences.

April 30, 1959

Nat said the other day, when asked how he did a certain problem with
fractions, "I find it almost always has some diagonal form." He was looking
for a rule to fit all cases with no thought of what fractions actually represent.
Elaine, given fractions to add, still adds the tops and the bottoms (+ means
add, so when you see a +, you add everything in sight).

I watched Nat working on 1/3 + 1/4 =? He started writing equivalent

fractions for 1/3, 2/6, 4/12, 8/24, etc. Using this doubling process, he wrote a
long string of fractions. Then he did the same for1/2: 2/8, 4/16,8/32. But he
couldn't figure out why he couldn't get a common denominator for both
fractions. Sam had to show him that 1/4 could be written as 6/24.

Rule following! Some of these kids are like a man traveling across open
country in a tank. They look out at the world through a tiny peephole, point
themselves at a target and start off, but if a bump throws them off course and
they lose sight of the target, they're lost. They don't know where they started
from, how far they have gone, or where they are.

A first-grader was doing a page of problems in a workbook. The answers

were given, but some were right, others not, and the child was supposed to
mark them accordingly. He marked the first three or four correct, and then
put an X by the next one. He did it so quickly that the teacher asked how he
knew it was wrong. He said, "Oh, they always put a wrong one about here."

Children's rules. I see nothing wrong any more with these children's
attempts to find rules for working with fractions, even if some of those rules
seem pretty wild. After all, Kepler, as he tried for about twenty-five years to
find the laws governing the motion of the planets round the sun, made some
wild guesses of his own. The trouble with the children was that they had no
way of finding out whether their rules worked. They could not use either
reality or internal logic and consistency as a way of checking them. Instead,
they took their work to the teacher and said, "Is this right?"

Furthermore, the rules they invented themselves were so wild, so

haphazard, so unconnected with anything, that even when they stumbled on
a rule that worked, i.e., got some teacher to say 'That's right," they could
rarely remember the rule, or what kinds of problems it was supposed to work
with.

June 15, 1959

Kids in school seem to use a fairly consistent strategy. Even the good
students use it much of the time, the bad students use it all the time, and
everyone uses it when they feel under pressure. One-way of describing this
strategy is to say that it is answer- centered rather than problem-centered.
The difference can best be seen by comparing the way in which the two
kinds of people deal with a problem.
 The problem-centered person sees a problem as a statement about a
situation, from which something has been left out. In other words, there is in
this situation a relationship or consequence that has not been stated and that
must be found. He attacks the problem by thinking about the situation, by
trying to create it whole in his mind. When he sees it whole, he knows which
part has been left out, and the answer comes almost by itself. The answer to
any problem, school problem, is in the problem, only momentarily hidden
from view. Finding it is like finding a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. If
you look at the empty space in the puzzle, you know the shape of the piece
that must fill it.

But most children in school are answer-centered rather than problem-

centered. They see a problem as a kind of announcement that, far off in
some mysterious Answerland there is an answer, which they are supposed to
go out and find. Some children begin right away to try to pry this answer out
of the mind of the teacher. Little children are good at this. They know,
especially if they are cute-looking, that if they look baffled or frightened
enough, teacher will usually tell them what they need to know. This is called
"helping them." Bolder children are ready to sally forth into Answerland in a
kind of treasure hunt for the answer. For them, the problem is an answer-
getting recipe, a set of hints or clues telling them what to do, like
instructions for finding buried pirate treasure-go to the big oak, walk a
hundred paces in line with the top of the church steeple, etc. These
producers think, "Let's see, what did I do last time I had problem like this?"
If they remember their recipes, and don't mix them up, they may be good at
the answer-hunting game, and the answers they bring home may often be
right ones.

Take the problem "Ann is three years older than Mary, and their ages add
up to 21. How old is each?" The problem-centered person tries to make these
girls real in his mind. Are they grown up? No; their ages will add up to too
much. They have to be about 10. Ah but a few of the possible Arms and
Mary's disappear, and the correct pair looms up larger and larger, until there
they are, aged 9 and 12.

The problem-centered person may use a formula. He might see very

quickly that Ann and Mary's ages added up to twice Mary's age, plus three.
He might even write down something like A + M = 21; M + M + 3 = 21; 2M
= 18; so M = 9 and A = 12. But the point is that he would get this formula,
this problem-solving process, out of the problem itself; not out of his
memory.

The answer-centered person, on the other hand, the skilled one, not the
coaxer of teachers or the reader of teachers' minds, thinks, "Now let me see,
how are we supposed to do this kind of problem? When did I have one like
it? Oh, yes, I remember, you write down something about their ages, let's
see, let x equal Mary's age, then we have to let Arm's age be something, I
guess x + 3, then what do we do, add them together, maybe, yes, that's right,
x + x + 3 = 21, then we have to transpose the 3, how do we do that, subtract
from both sides..." and so on until he gets an answer which he takes to the
teacher and says, "Is this right?" But this answer was elsewhere, not in the
problem, and the answer-getting process had to be dredged up out of blind
memory.

Practically everything we do in school tends to make children answer-

centered. In the first place, right answers pay off. Schools are a kind of
temple of worship for "right answers," and the way to get ahead is to lay
plenty of them on the altar. In the second place, the chances are good that
teachers themselves are answer-centered, certainly in mathematics, but by no
means only there. What they do, they do because this is what they were or
are told to do, or what the book says to do, or what they have always done.
In the third place, even those teachers who are not themselves answer-
centered will probably not see, as for many years I did not, the distinction
between answer-centeredness and problem- centeredness, far less understand
its importance. Thus their ways of teaching children, and, above all, the
sheer volume of work they give them, will force the children into answer-
directed strategies, if only because there isn't time for anything else. I have
noticed many times that when the workload of the class is light, kids are
willing to do some thinking, to take time to figure things out; when the
workload is heavy, the "I-don't-get-it" begins to sound, the thinking stops,
they expect us to show them everything. Thus one ironical consequence of
the drive for so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too
busy to think.

The other day I was working with a sixteen-year- old boy who was having
trouble with first-year physics. I asked him to do one of the problems in his
book. Immediately he began to write on his paper

Given:
 To Find:
Use:

He began to fill in the spaces with a hash of letters and figures. I said,
"Whoa, hold on, you don't even know what the problem is about; at least
think about it before you start writing down a mess of stuff." He said, "But
our teacher tells us we have to do all our problems this way." So there we
are. No doubt this teacher would say that he wants his students to think
about problems, and that he prescribed this form so that they would think.
But what he has not seen, and probably never will see, is that his means to
the end of clearer thinking has become an end in itself, just part of the ritual
mumbo-jumbo you have to go through on your answer hunt.

When kids are in a situation where they are not under pressure to come up
with a right answer, far less do it quickly, they can do amazing things. Last
fall, about November, I gave the afternoon section some problems. I said,
"You have never seen problems like these, you don't know how to do them,
and I don't care whether you get them right or not. I just want to see how you
go about trying to do them." The problems were basically simple algebra
problems, like the one about Am and Mary, or a certain number of nickels
and dimes adding up to 85 cents--the kind of problem that many first-year
algebra students find so difficult. These fifth-graders tore into them with
imagination, resourcefulness, and common sense--in a word, intelligently.
They solved them in many ways, including some I hadn't thought of. But it
was about that time that the school began to worry about my going too
slowly. Soon I was told to speed up the pace, which I am ashamed to say I
did, and the children lapsed right back into their old strategies. Probably for
keeps.

October 1, 1959

Not long ago Dr. Gattegno taught a demonstration class at Lesley-Ellis

School. I don't believe I will ever forget it. It was one of the most
extraordinary and moving spectacles I have seen in all my life.

The subjects chosen for this particular demonstration were a group of

severely retarded children. There were about five or six fourteen- or fifteen-
year-olds. Some of them, except for unusually expressionless faces, looked
quite normal; the one who caught my eye was a boy at the end of the table.
He was tall, pale, with black hair. I have rarely seen on a human face such
anxiety and tension as showed on his. He kept darting looks around the room
like a bird, as if enemies might come from any quarter left unguarded for
more than a second. His tongue worked continuously in his mouth, bulging
out first one cheek and then the other. Under the table, he scratched--or
rather clawed--at his leg with one hand. He was a terrifying and pitiful sight
to see.

With no formalities or preliminaries, no icebreaking or jollying up,

Gattegno went to work. It will help you see more vividly what was going on
if, providing you have rods at hand, you actually do the operations I will
describe. First he took two blue (9) rods [1] and between them put a dark
green (6), so that between the two blue rods and above the dark green there
was an empty space 3 cm long. He said to the group, "Make one like this."
They did. Then he said, "Now find the rod that will just fill up that space." I
don't know how the other children worked on the problem; I was watching
the dark-haired boy. His movements were spasmodic, feverish. When he had
picked a rod out of the pile in the center of the table, he could hardly stuff it
in between his blue rods. After several trials, he and the others found that a
light green (3) rod would fill the space.

Then Gattegno, holding his blue rods at the upper end, shook them, so that
after a bit the dark green rod fell out. Then he turned the rods over, so that
now there was a 6-cm space where the dark green rod had formerly been. He
asked the class to do the same. They did. Then he asked them to find the rod
that would fill that space. Did they pick out of the pile the dark green rod
that had just come out of that space? Not one did. Instead, more trial and
error. Eventually, they all found that the dark green rod was needed.

Then Gattegno shook his rods so that the light green fell out, leaving the
original empty 3-cm space, and turned them again so that the empty space
was uppermost. Again he asked the children to fill the space, and again, by
trial and error, they found the needed light green rod. As before, it took the
dark-haired boy several trials to find the right rod. These trials seemed to be
completely haphazard.

Hard as it may be to believe, Gattegno went through this cycle at least four
or five times before anyone was able to pick the needed rod without
hesitation and without trial and error. As I watched, I thought, "What must it
be like to have so little idea of the way the world works, so little feeling for
the regularity, the orderliness, the sensibleness of things?" It takes a great
effort of the imagination to push oneself back, back, back to the place where
we knew as little as these children. It is not just a matter of not knowing this
fact or that fact; it is a matter of living in a universe like the one lived in by
very young children, a universe which is utterly whimsical and
unpredictable, where nothing has anything to do with anything else--with
this difference, that these children had come to feel, as most very young
children do not, that this universe is an enemy.

Then, as I watched, the dark-haired boy saw! Something went "click"

inside his head, and for the first time, his hand visibly shaking with
excitement, he reached without trial and error for the right rod. He could
hardly stuff it into the empty space. It worked! The tongue going round in
the mouth, and the hand clawing away at the leg under the table doubled
their pace. When the time came to turn the rods over and fill the other empty
space, he was almost too excited to pick up the rod he wanted; but he got it
in. "It fits! It fits!" he said, and held up the rods for all of us to see. Many of
us were moved to tears, by his excitement and joy, and by our realization of
the great leap of the mind he had just taken.

After a while, Gattegno did the same problem, this time using a crimson
(4) and yellow (5) rod between the blue rods. This time the black-haired boy
needed only one cycle to convince himself that these were the rods he
needed. This time he was calmer, surer; he knew.

Again using the rods, Gattegno showed them what we mean when we say
that one thing is half of another. He used the white (1) and red (2), and the
red and the crimson (4) to demonstrate the meaning of "half." Then he asked
them to find half of some of the other rods, which the dark-haired boy was
able to do. Just before the end of the demonstration Gattegno showed them a
brown (8) rod and asked them to find half of half of it, and this too the dark-
haired boy was able to do.

I could not but feel then, as I do now, that whatever his IQ may be
considered to have been, and however he may have reacted to life as he
usually experienced it, this boy, during that class, had played the part of a
person of high intelligence and had done intellectual work of very high
quality. When we think of where he started, and where he finished, of the
immense amount of mathematical territory that he covered in forty minutes
or less, it is hard not to feel that there is an extraordinary capacity locked up
inside that boy.
 It is the tragedy of his life that he will probably never again find himself
with a man like Gattegno, who knows, as few teachers do, that it is his
business to put himself into contact with the intelligence of his students,
wherever and whatever that may be, and who has enough intuition and
imagination to do it. He has not done much work with retarded children, but
he saw in a moment what I might have taken days or weeks to find out, or
might never have found out: that to get in touch with the intelligence of
these children, to give them solid ground to stand and move on, he had to go
way, way back, to the very beginning of learning and understanding. Nor
was this all he brought to the session. Equally important was a kind of
respect for these children, a conviction that under the right circumstances
they could and would do first-class thinking. There was no condescension or
pity in his manner, nor even any noticeable sympathy. For the duration of
the class he and these children were no less than colleagues, trying to work
out a tough problem--and working it out.

The point of this incident may be misunderstood; indeed, is being

misunderstood. Many people, reading of Gattegno's work with these boys,
will think I am saying that if Gattegno could have just spent enough time
with them, he could have made them smart. That is not my point at all. What
I am saying is that they were already smart. What Gattegno did, for an hour
or so, was to put within their reach a miniature universe on which they could
exercise the intelligence they already had, a universe in which they could do
real things and see for themselves whether what they had done worked or
not.

Many people, having finally realized that human intelligence in any broad
and important sense is not fixed but highly variable may be and indeed are
drawing the wrong conclusion that we can now set out to "teach"
intelligence just as we used to try to "teach" math or English or history. But
it is just as true of intelligence as it has always been true of school subjects
that teaching--"I know something you should know and I'm going to make
you learn it"--is above all else what prevents learning .

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.

Ingenious teachers, "gifted" teachers, teachers who are good at thinking up

new and better ways to teach things, can do just about as much harm to their
students as the teachers who are content to plug along with the standard
workbooks and teachers' manuals. These gifted teachers can't stop teaching.
They are like someone who tries to help a friend start a car by giving it a
push. He grunts and strains, the car gets rolling, the engine catches and
begins to run. The driver says, "It's going now, you can let go." But the
pusher won't let go. "No, no," he says, "you can't go without me, the car
won't go unless I keep pushing." So the car, now ready to run at full speed, is
held back--unless the driver wants to break free and leave the helper on his
face in the road. And most learners, children above all, can't break free of
their teachers.

The inventors of clever teaching ideas tend to think that if one good
teaching idea helps to make some learning happen, a hundred good ideas
will make a hundred times as much learning happen. Not so. A hundred
good ideas may stop the learning altogether.

It took me a long time to learn, as a classroom teacher, that on the days

when I came to class just bursting with some great teaching idea, good
things rarely happened. The children, with their great quickness and
keenness of perception, would sense that there was something "funny,"
wrong, about me. Instead of being a forty-year-old human being in a room
full of ten-year-old human beings, I was now a "scientist" in a room full of
laboratory animals. I was no longer in the class to talk about things that
interested me, or them, or to enjoy what I and they were doing, but to try
something out on them. In no time at all they fell back into their old
defensive and evasive strategies, began to give me sneaky looks, to ask for
hints, to say, "I don't get it." I could see them growing stupid in front of my
eyes.

By the time I was teaching my last fifth-grade class, I usually knew

enough, when I saw this happening, to back off and drop my big project and
go back to our more normal, natural, honest classroom life. If 1 had some
sort of gadget that I thought might interest the children, I would leave it in a
corner of the room and say nothing about it until someone said "What's that,
what's it for, how do you work it?" Or if there was some kind of activity I
wanted to "expose" them to, I would do it myself, without saying anything. I
assumed that whatever did not interest me would probably not interest them,
and was not trying to seduce them into doing things that I myself found
boring. But if there were things I liked to do and could do in the classroom, I
often did them there.
 February 14, 1960

I gave Edward a handful of rods and asked, "How many whites would you
need to make this many?" He arranged the rods in 10cm rows, making 15
rows of 10 with a crimson (4) left over. Then he began to count the rows,
counting by tens-a sensible procedure--saying, as he touched each row, "10,
20, 30..." and so on up to 100. Then, to my utter astonishment, he said, as he
touched the remaining five rows of 10 and the crimson, "200, 300, 400, 500,
600, 604."

I asked him to try again. He assumed that he had made a mistake. This
time he counted, as before, up to 100, then, as he touched the remaining
rows, said, "101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109." But he did not look satisfied with
this.

The next time Edward began to count the rows of 10, he said, "I'll call each
one of these rows 1."

However, when he got to the tenth row of 10, he called it 1000, and called
each additional row 100, so that his answer was in the 1500's. After fiddling
with this a bit, he went back to his original system, and after getting the
answer 604 several times, said with assurance that it was right.

I split the group of rods into two sections, ten rows of 10 in one, five rows
of 10, and the crimson, in the other. I asked how much was in each group.
After counting, he said there was 100 in the large group, and 54 in the small.
I slid the two groups together and asked how many there were in all He went
through his usual routine and said again, "604."

What I should have realized at this point is that my question was

meaningless to him. I thought I was using the rods to test his ideas of
number. From his answers I now see that there was little or no connection
between the rods and his ideas of number, whatever they were.

I should add that Edward was a very unsuccessful student, way behind
grade level in all subjects, above all in arithmetic. If he had been able to do
school arithmetic well I wouldn't have meddled with his understanding.
 What I might have done, should have done, wish I had done, was give him
a huge stack of white rods and ask him to find out how many white rods he
would need to make as long a row as he could make with the rods I had on
his desk. What I also might have done, and should have done, since I could
not get a large quantity of white (l-cm) rods, was to find a meter stick or
meter/centimeter measuring tape, which Edward could then have used to
check his ideas about the rods. But first it might have been at least helpful
and probably necessary--assuming, that is, that this work I was doing with
Edward was worth doing at all--to have helped him discover or at least feel
sure of the fact that a given quantity of white (1-cm) rods, say six of them,
could in fact make a row 6 cm long, or as long as the 6-cm rod. The point of
the rods was that they were a concrete way of matching up the idea of
number as quantity--six of this, five of that--with the idea of length--6 cm
long 5, cm long. This was obvious to me, but it was probably not obvious to
Edward at all.

What he understood my question to mean, what he thought I was asking

him to do, I'll never know. He knew I had asked a question that required him
to reply with a number. He knew that certain of the rods were associated
with numbers. His idea, I guess, was to combine those numbers in different
ways to see if he could come up with some number that would satisfy me, be
the "right" answer to my meaningless question. There was no way in which
he could use the reality he perceived through his senses either to find the
right answer or to test the rightness of any answers he gave. It was another
year before I was able to think up some problems in which children really
could test their thinking against reality. More on this later.

I took away the crimson rod, again split the rods into a group of 100 and a
group of 50, and asked how many were in each. Again he told me there were
100 in the large group and 50 in the small. When I slid them together, he
told me there were 600.

I then put out 100. "How many are there?" "100." I added a white rod, and
asked, "How many now?" "101."I added another white rod and asked, "How
many now?" "102."And so up to 109. But then, when I added one more
white rod, giving me eleven rows of 10, and asked how many there were, he
said, "200."

I said, "Okay, let's quit for today."

 Now, Edward's former teachers gave him many hours of special,
individual "help" on arithmetic. But their help consisted in trying to get him
to learn the recipes for the problems that he was supposed to know how to
do. None of them tried to find out, as for years I never did, just what he did
know about numbers, what sort of mental model he had of the world of
numbers and how they behaved. As a matter of fact, this boy, if he is feeling
good, can carry out correctly quite a number of arithmetic recipes; he is by
no means the worst in the class in this respect. But this knowledge is
apparent, not real.

The distinction is vital, yet many teachers do not seem to know that it
exists. They think, if a child doesn't know how to multiply, you show him
how, and give him practice and drill. If he still makes mistakes, you show
him how again, and give more practice. If after you have done this about a
dozen times he still makes mistakes, you assume that he is either unable or
unwilling to learn--as one teacher put it, either stupid, lazy, disorganized, or
emotionally disturbed.

It's the same old school rule, all the way from our most hopeless inner-city
schools to the graduate schools of our most famous universities: when
Learning happens, the school and teachers take the credit; when it doesn't,
the students get the blame. The words change a little, from bad and stupid to
"culturally disadvantaged" and "learning disabled." The idea remains the
same. Only when the results are good will schools and teachers accept the
responsibility for what they do.

We do not consider that a child may be unable to learn because he does not
grasp the fundamental nature of the symbols he is working with. If numbers
themselves are meaningless, how can multiplication be meaningful? Trying
to teach such children to multiply, divide, etc., is like trying to build a ten-
story building on a foundation of old cardboard boxes. With the best will in
the world, it can't be done. The foundation must be rebuilt first. Children like
Edward, and there are many, would not be in the spot they are in if all along
the line their teachers had been concerned to build slowly and solidly,
instead of trying to make it look as if the children knew all the material that
was supposed to be covered.

The other day I asked the class to find a number of pairs of numbers of
which the smaller was one fifth of the larger. Edward wrote 1, 5, and then 5,
25. Then he looked at the 1, 5 for a while. It occurred to him to try the
system of adding 1 to each number, giving him the pairs 2, 6; 3, 7; 4, 8; and
so on. And that is what he wrote down. The original problem was forgotten,
had turned into something else. Edward's unsteerable mental wagon had
been bumped off course and was now rolling in a new direction.

One reason children like this have trouble checking their work is that
checking requires you to look at, and keep in mind, two very different
things-- what you are doing, and what you meant to do, what you ought to be
doing. Edward shifts his focus of attention so slowly that when he has
figured out what he was supposed to be doing, he has forgotten what he was
doing, and vice verse. I sometimes imagine him dialing a phone number. He
has it written before him. He looks at it, and begins to dial. By the time he
has dialed two or three digits, he has forgotten the rest of the number. He
looks back at the paper, and reminds himself of the number; but by now he
has forgotten what he has already dialed, and must begin again. Maybe
Edward doesn't do this with phones, but it is exactly how he does his math, I
can often hear him muttering to himself, "Let's see, where was I?"

When I asked for pairs of numbers, one of them half of the other, he wrote:
"1 is half of 2; 2 is half of 4; 4 is half of 6; 6 is half of 8." For one third, he
wrote: "3 is one third of 6; 1 is one third of 6; 6 is one third of 12; 12 is one
third of 18." Then, later: "1 is one fourth of 4; 10 is one fourth of 40; 40 is
one fourth of 70; 70 is one fourth of 100; ..." Or "7 is half of 14; 14 is half of
21; 21 is half of 28; ..." The only meaningful relationship he can see between
two numbers is the additive one. Perhaps the reason is that he relies so
heavily on counting, which is an additive operation,

Edward has acquired the habit of acting unintelligently in math class

because for years he has not really known what he was doing. This
unintelligent behavior has become fixed, and would be hard to change. But
remembering Gattegno and those retarded children; I think it might be done.
Intelligence can be destroyed; perhaps it can also be rebuilt.

March 2, 1960

This entry shows that I had already learned something from my

experiences of February 14.

A child who has really learned something can use it, and does use it. It is
connected with reality in his mind, therefore he can make other connections
between it and reality when the chance comes. A piece of unreal learning
has no hooks on it; it can't be attached to anything, it is of no use to the
learner.

Our first-graders are using the rods. They know them by name and by
length. They are used to calling the orange rod the 10-rod, a bad habit which
we can't break them of. They can count up to 100 or higher. They have been
told, and many of them can repeat, the usual school rigmarole about tens,
units, and so forth. The other day I thought I would see how many of them
grasped and could use the fact that a number like 38 could be represented by
three orange (10) rods and a brown (8). One at a time, I asked them, if we
started at the edge of their desk, how far across a row of 38 whites would
reach. One little girl immediately took out three orange rods and a brown,
lined them up, and showed me. Her expression said clearly, "What's so hard
about that?" Every other child out of seven or eight, including most of the
able children in the class, tried to do it by lining up white rods, usually
losing count several times in the process.

This suggests that though the children call the dark green rod 6 they do not
fully grasp that it is equivalent to 6 whites--even though they could probably
tell you so if you asked them. Six is just a name that the dark green happens
to have; it has nothing to do with its size in relation to some other rod. They
look at the rods as another kind of numeral, symbols made of colored wood
rather than marks on paper. Asked 5 + 4 = ?, they take the rod named 5 and
the rod named 4, put them end to end, and find that they match the rod
whose name is 9; but they don't grasp the way in which this kind of
operation is the same as the operation of combining a group of 5 and another
group of 4 separate objects.

Some second-graders, given problems like 59 + 42 + 35, got their carrying

mixed up and got answers in the 1200's, or higher. They seemed perfectly
satisfied. One reason they did not know that 1200 was too big is that they do
not know how big 1200 is. We can't expect children to work sensibly with
numbers, checking their work against some notion of reality, when we ask
them to do calculations involving magnitudes they do not understand.
Perhaps we should ask more questions like: How long a row would 38 (or
50, 75, 100, 200, 500, 1000) white rods make, put side by side? How many
white rods would be needed to cover given rectangles, a piece of paper, the
top of a desk, and the floor of a room? How many whites would be needed
to fill boxes of various sizes?
 The children are willing to accept all kinds of mathematical shorthand if I
tell them that I am too lazy to write out things the long way. In the first
place, this is true. In the second place, it gives them a chance to make fun of
my laziness, and to feel (which is also true) that in accepting my shorthand
they are doing me a kind of favor. They do not like to be told that a certain
symbol "means" something. This seems arbitrary and mysterious. But if you
express a relationship or an operation in terms with which they are familiar,
they will soon be perfectly willing to let you use some kind of shorthand to
express it. Thus we can go from "Two whites are as long as one red" to "2
whites = 1 red" to "2 X w = r."

After all, men invented mathematical symbols to save the trouble of

writing things out the long way, so what I am doing in class is both logically
and historically correct. No symbol "means" anything until we decide and
agree to let it mean something; so why not let children feel that they are in
on this decision?

We make a serious mistake in asking children to perform symbolically

operations, which they could not perform concretely. A child should be able
to find out which has the most whites, a group of 37 or a group of 28, and
how many more it has, before he is asked to do a problem like 37 - 28 =?,
and he should be able to do this latter kind of problem easily before he is
given a rule for doing it. So with all the operations of arithmetic. Numerical
arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of doing
things that they know how to do already, not a set of mysterious recipes for
getting right answers to meaningless questions.

On the whole I still agree with this. Still, today's cheap calculators give us
another path through which children can explore numbers and number
operations. We could get a very simple calculator, one that adds, subtracts,
multiplies, and divides, but not much else, and show children how to use it
to "do" certain kinds of problems. Thus, to "do" 3 + 8 =?, we would say,"
Turn the machine on, push the 3 key, then the + key, then the 8 key, then the
= key, and you'll have your answer." To do 4 x 6, "Push the 4 key, then the
X key, then the 6 key, then the = key, and there's your answer." No
explanations at all about what it means. Then leave the children alone.
Chances are that quite a lot of them will begin to invent other problems and
do them on the machine, in a highly unsystematic way. Doing this, they will
collect a lot of random and meaningless data, as when they were first
hearing language. But as with language, they will slowly begin to intuit and
test ideas about how these numbers and operations work. After a while they
will want to know and will figure out how to make the machine do what they
want, or how to guess in advance what the machine will do.

In short, they will begin to make their own sense, their own mental
models, of at least a part of the world of numbers.

April 16, 1960

There are sixteen kids in my math class. Four are poor students; one is fair;
all the rest are exceptionally bright and able, with a good feel for math. They
have all had place value explained to them many times.

The other day I asked, "Suppose I go to the bank with a check for
$1437.50, cash it, and ask them to give me as much of the money as possible
in ten dollar bills. How many tens will I get?" I wrote the number on the
board. After some scrambling around for pencils and scratch paper, answers
began to appear. None were correct; most were wildly off. A few kids got
the answer on the second or third try; most never got it.

I erased the original number from the board, and wrote 975.00. "How
many tens will you get?" Everyone knew. I then wrote $175.00. "Now how
many?" This was much harder; a few got it, most did not. After a while,
pointing to the digit 7 in 175, I asked, "What does this 7 tell me?" They said
it meant that I had 70 dollars, or 7 tens. I wrote it on the board. Then I said,
"Now how about this 1T" They ail said that it meant that we had a hundred
dollars. Nobody said that it meant just as well that we had ten more tens. I
said, "How many tens could we get for that hundred?" They all said 10. I
pointed out that these 10 tens, plus the 7 they had already told us about,
would give us 17 tens. I then wrote our first number--$1437.50--on the
board. We considered how many tens were represented by each digit. The 3
told us we had 3 tens; the 4, that we had 40 more; the 1, that we had 100
more, for a total of 143 tens. I drew a circle around the digits 143 in the
numeral 1437. By this time everyone was saying, "Oh, yeah, I get it; I see;
it's easy; it's cinchy." But I was skeptical, believing no longer in the magic
power of "good explanations."

Two days later I wrote on the board $14357.50, and asked how many
hundred dollar bills I could get if I cashed a check for that much. Some
answers were 43, 17, 107, 142, 604, 34, 13100, and 22. Only one student got
the answer the first time. Four more eventually got it, before I worked it on
the board. The other eleven were completely stumped. Again, I put the
numeral 14357 on the board, and went through digit by digit, showing how
many hundreds were represented by each digit, and therefore, how many
hundreds were in the entire number. But I doubt that they understand place
value any better than they did before.

This lack of understanding makes long division hard, or impossible, for

many children. Take the problem 260 divided by 5. We cannot divide two
hundreds evenly among five people, so we must change them into something
that we can divide. We exchange our two hundreds for 20 tens. We now
have 26 tens in all. We divide 25 of these among our five people, giving
them five 10's each. We have one 10 left, which we exchange for ten l's,
which we divide among our five people, so that they have five 10's and two
1's apiece. Our way of doing long division depends on this idea of making
change, and a child who does not know that this is what he is doing, or why
he is doing it, will see long division, as most children do, as a meaningless
recipe which will give him endless trouble.

In his very important and very funny book How to Survive in Your Native
Land, James Herndon has one very revealing chapter called "The Dumb
Class." That class, which he taught for a few years, was made up of the
dumbest kids in his junior high school, the kids who couldn't and didn't learn
anything. And even among these one boy stood out as clearly the dumbest
kid in the dumb class, utterly hopeless at any kind of schoolwork.

One day Jim met this boy in a bowling alley. To his utter astonishment he
found that the kid had a paying job there, keeping official score for the
evening bowling leagues. He sat on a high chair between two lanes, scoring
for both of them at once, keeping track of strikes, spares, etc. Jim points out
that this job was not some federal program to give dumb kids something to
do. The bowling alley had hired and was paying the kid to keep score
because he worked quickly and accurately-no one in the highly competitive
leagues would have stood for mistakes.

So, Jim thought, I'll give these kid problems about bowling in school. He
couldn't do them! His answers to problems about scoring in bowling were
not only wrong but also absurd. The dumb kids might be smart in the world,
but as soon as they stepped into the school they became dumb again. It was
the school itself, boring, threatening, cut off from any real experience or
serious purpose, that made them dumb.

June 20, 1960

How can we tell whether children understand something or not? When I

was a student, I generally knew when I understood and when I didn't. This
had nothing to do with marks; in the last math course I took in college I got a
respectable grade, but by the end of the year I realized I didn't have the
faintest idea of what the course was about. In Colorado I assumed for a long
time that my students knew when they did, or did not, understand something.
I was always urging them to tell me when they did not understand, so that
with one of my clever "explanations" I could clear up everything. But they
never would tell me. I came to know by painful experience that not a child in
a hundred knows whether or not he understands something, much less, if he
does not, why he does not. The child who knows, we don't have to worry
about; he will be an A student. How do we find out when, and what, the
others don't understand?

What first comes to mind is some external test. But what kind? By now I
have many times seen children crank out right answers to problems without
the faintest idea of what they were doing. They are blind recipe-followers.
Some can even parrot back my explanations, but again without knowing
what they mean. On the other hand, there are many children who are so
paralyzed by their fear of tests that they can't show what they do know,
while others who understand clearly what they are doing get confused and
scared when they try to put it into words.

Part of the answer to the problem may be to give children the kind of tests
I used this year, in which there was a mixture of problems. These tend to
throw the automatic answer-finding machinery out of gear and to make them
do some thinking about what they are doing. It may help, too, to give
problems in a form new to them. But what do we do when the result of such
tests is to show that hardly any of our pupils understand anything of what we
have been trying to teach them during the year?

It may help to have in our minds a picture of what we mean by

understanding. I feel I understand something if I can do some, at least, of the
following: (1) state it in my own words; (2) give examples of it; (3)
recognize it in various guises and circumstances; (4) see connections
between it and other facts or ideas; (5) make use of it in various ways; (6)
foresee some of its consequences; (7) state its opposite or converse. This list
is only a beginning; but it may help us in the future to find out what our
students really know as opposed to what they can give the appearance of
knowing, their real learning as opposed to their apparent learning.

There are many, of course, who say that this distinction does not exist. It's
their handy way of solving the knotty problem of understanding; just say
there is no such thing. Apparently this view is currently in fashion among
psychologists. According to many of them, if you can say that 7 x 8 = 56,
you know all there is to know about that particular fact, and you know as
much about it as anyone else who can say it. The mathematician, the third-
grader, and, presumably, a well-trained parrot, would all have an equal and
identical understanding of this fact. The only difference between the
mathematician and the child is that the mathematician carries around in his
head many more such facts. So to make children into mathematicians all we
have to do is train them, condition them, until they can say many such facts.
Teach them to say everything that Einstein knew, and hey, presto! Another
Einstein!

It's amazing what nonsense people will believe.

Of course, this notion fits neatly into behaviorism, which is also still very
much in fashion, despite all it cannot explain. It is also comforting to
teachers, who have felt all along that their job is to drop, or push, one at a
time, little bits of information into those largely empty minds that are
moving slowly before them down the academic assembly line. And finally, it
has set into motion the apparently endless gravy train of programmed
instruction and machine teaching, onto which everyone and his brother seem
to be happily clambering.

But pieces of information like 7 x 8 = 56 are not isolated facts. They are
parts of the landscape, the territory of numbers, and that person knows them
best who sees most clearly how they fit into the landscape and all the other
parts of it. The mathematician knows, among many other things, that 7 X 8
= 56 is an illustration of the fact that products of even integers are even; that
7 x 8 is the same as 14 X 4 or 28 X 2 or 56 X 1; that only these pairs of
positive integers will give 56 as a product; that 7 X 8 is (8 X 8) - 8, or (7 x 7)
+ 7, or (15 X 4) - 4; and so on. He also knows that 7 X 8 = 56 is a way of
expressing in symbols a relationship that may take many forms in the world
of real objects; thus he knows that a rectangle 8 units long and 7 units wide
will have an area of 56 square units. But the child who has learned to say
like a parrot, "Seven times eight is fifty-six" knows nothing of its relation
either to the real world or to the world of numbers. He has nothing but blind
memory to help him. When memory fails, he is perfectly capable of saying
that 7 X 8 = 23, or that 7 x 8 is smaller than 7 x 5, or larger than 7 x 10.
Even when he knows 7 x 8, he may not know 8 X 7, he may say it is
something quite different. And when he remembers 7 X 8, he cannot use it.
Given a rectangle of 7 cm X 8 cm, and asked how many l-sq-cm pieces he
would need to cover it, he will over and over again cover the rectangle with
square pieces and laboriously count them up, never seeing any connection
between his answer and the multiplication tables he has memorized.

Knowledge, learning, understanding, are not linear. They are not little bits
of facts lined up in rows or piled up one on top of another. A field of
knowledge, whether it be math, English, history, science, music, or
whatever, is a territory, and knowing it is not just a matter of knowing all the
items in the territory, but of knowing how they relate to, com- pare with, and
fit in with each other. It is the difference between being able to say that a
room in your house has so many tables, so many chairs, so many lamps, and
being able to close your eyes and see that this chair goes here and that table
there. It is the difference between knowing the names of all the streets in a
city and being able to get from any place, by any desired route, to any other
place.

I believe this now more strongly than ever, and it seems to me as important
as any other idea set forth in this book.

Why do we talk and write about the world and our knowledge of it as if
they were linear? Because that is the nature of talk. Words come out in
single file, one at a time; there's no other way to talk or write. So in order to
talk about it, we cut the real, undivided world into little pieces, and make
these into strings of talk, like beads on a necklace. But we must not be
fooled; these strings of talk are not what the world is like. Our learning is not
real, not complete, not accurate, above all not useful, unless we take these
word strings and somehow convert them in our minds into a likeness of the
world, a working mental model of the universe, as we know it. Only when
we have made such a model, and when there is at least a rough
correspondence between that model and reality, can it be said of us that we
have learned something.
 What happens in school is that children take in these word strings and
store them, undigested, in their minds, so that they can spit them back out on
demand. But these words do not change anything, fit with anything, relate to
anything. They are as empty of meaning as parrot speech is to a parrot. How
can we make school a place where real learning goes on, and not just word
swallowing?

I now realize that when we keep trying to find out what our students
understand we are more likely than not to destroy whatever understanding
they may have. Not until people get very secure in their knowledge and very
skillful in talking about it--which rules out almost all young children--is
there much point in asking them to talk about what they know, and how they
know they know it. The closest we can come to finding out what children
really know---and it's not very close - is to watch what they do when they
are free to do what interests them most.

What we may sometimes be able to do is give students ways in which, if

they want, they can test their own understanding, or the correctness of their
ideas. But even here we must be careful not to suppose that if one idea for
self-testing is good a hundred must be better. The best rules are still the ones
that learners make out of their own experience.

September 11, 1960

During a visit, two friends asked me to do some math with their ten-year-
old daughter, who was having some trouble. I said okay; the child and I have
been friends for many years, and I thought I might be able to find out
something about her way of thinking about arithmetic problems. I began
with mental arithmetic. I planned to ask her 2 x 76, and when she had given
the answer, 2 X 77. I wanted to see whether she would just add 2 to her first
answer, or whether she would treat the second problem as if it was brand
new. But I was set back when she told me that 2 X 76 was 432.

After some mental calculating, I saw that in doing this problem in her head
she had multiplied the 2 by the 6, and then the 7 by the 6; in short, that she
had multiplied 6 X 72--correctly, by the way. I asked her to do it again, and
again she said 432, showing how strong is our tendency to repeat our own
errors, to keep going in the tracks we have already made.
 I then said, "What is 2 X 100?" She said, "200." I asked for 2 x 90. 180. 2
x 80? (Pause) 160. 2 X 76? 432. 2 x 70? 140. 2 x 80? 160. 2 x 76? 432. 2 x
100? 200. 2 X 200? 400. 2 X 76? 432 ... Here she stopped, looked at me
searchingly, and then said, "Now wait a minute." She ran to get pencil and
paper, saying, "This doesn't make sense, I'm going to figure this out." On the
paper, she worked out that 2 X 76 was 152.

Something very important happened when she said, "Now wait a minute."
She was seeing, perhaps for the first time, that we can ask of an answer to a
problem, not just "Is it right?" or "Is it wrong?" but "Is it sensible?" and that
we can often see, without yet knowing the right answer, that the answer we
have doesn't make any sense, is inconsistent with other things we know to be
true.

After a little more work she went to bed, pleased with what she had done.
Later, I told her parents about her work, to show the kind of difficulties
children get into when they don't know, in general, how numbers behave,
and know only unrelated facts and recipes. Her father said he understood
more clearly what we were trying to do with Cuisenaire rods; but her mother
said, defiantly and angrily, that she couldn't understand all these new ideas,
and was going to continue working with her daughter as she had been, by
giving her a page of problems to do each day, with the threat that for each
problem done wrong she would be given several more problems to do.

This reaction astonishes and rather appalls me. Why should this mother be
so eager to have arithmetic applied to her child as a kind of punishment? She
reminds me of the many parents I have known who at one time or another
have urged me to crack down on their children. Do such people see school as
a kind of institutionalized punishment, something unpleasant that we can do
to children whether or not they have done anything bad to deserve it? What
is it that such people resent so about children?

October 16, 1960

I asked the new fifth-grade class, "How many white rods would you need
to make a row all the way across your desk?" Of the class of fifteen, about
half began to use orange (10) rods to measure with. The rest, with one
exception, began to line up white rods. When they ran out of whites, they
used red (2) rods, but putting them side-by-side, so that they were, so to
speak, acting like whites. When they ran out of reds, they used light greens
(3), and so on until they had a row all the way across the desk, which they
then counted up.

These children have been using the rods for three weeks or more. They are
all accustomed to them, and know the lengths of every rod well enough so
that they call them by their lengths. They are used to calling the orange rod
the 10-rod. They know it is as long as 10 whites, but they do not transfer this
knowledge to a situation in which it would make their work much easier.

I then asked them, "How many whites would you need to cover up one
sheet of pad paper [about 9' X 6']?" About ten children began covering the
entire sheet of paper with rods. A few of these stopped after a while,
realizing that every row was the same length. Some of the rest went on to
cover the entire paper before finding the length of a row and multiplying by
the number of rows. Others, after covering the entire paper, added up, rod by
rod, the lengths of all the rods they had used to cover it. Two children began
to cover their papers with rods, but they stood the rods on end, so that every
rod, whatever its length and color, covered only 1 sq cm. Naturally, they ran
out of rods long before the paper was covered; then they didn't know what to
do.

Dorothy covered her paper with rods, then told me that 44 whites would be
enough to cover it. This was a blind guess. I asked, "How many whites
would you need to cover an orange rod?" She said, "Around 8." I said, "Try
it and find out." She did, and found that 10 whites would be needed. I then
asked how many whites she would need to cover four orange rods. She just
stared at me in silence.

October 30, 1960

We did some work the other day on multiplication tables. The results were,
to say the least, astonishing. The paper was marked in a grid of 10 x 10
squares, that is, 100 squares arranged in 10 rows, 10 squares in each row.
Across the top row, and to the left of the left-hand column, were written the
numbers from 1 to 10, but in irregular order. Thus every one of the hundred
squares in the grid was in a numbered column and a numbered row. If a
square was in the row numbered 2 and the column numbered 3, the child
was to put in the square the product of 2 X 3, or 6. The square in the row
numbered 5 and the column numbered 7 would therefore be filled with the
number 35. And so on.
 From Marjorie's paper, I got: 4 X 6 = 22, 4 X 4 = 20, 4 X 7 = 32. Then, 10
X 10 = 20, and right beside it, 10 x 2 = 22. Then, side by side in the row
numbered 8, 8 x 8 = 48, 8 X 6 = 59, 8 X 4 = 40, 8 x 7 = 49, 8 x 9 = 42. In the
7 row, 7 x 5 = 35, 7 X 8 = 24, 7 x 7 = 47, 7 X 9 = 45.

I'm not making this up, I swear it!

In the 9 row we have 9 x 9 = 69, 9 x 10 = 40. In the 4 row, 4 X 8 = 62, 4 x

9 = 40.

Is it enough to say of this child that she does not know her tables?

November 12, 1960

A few days ago, when I was working with Marjorie, she stopped what she
was doing and said, "Can I ask you something?" I said, "Sure, go ahead."
She said that when she was adding on her fingers (embarrassed smile) and
was counting 10, 11, 12, 13, and so on, sometimes she held up her thumb
when she said 10, index finger for 11, middle finger for 12, and then other
times she said 11 when she held up her thumb, 12 for index finger, and so
on. But one of these methods always gave her the wrong answer, and she
could never be sure which. Would I tell her? I said, "Can you give me an
example of the kind of problem that might make you do this?" But she could
not. This kind of child seldom can.

What she needs is a broom to sweep out her mind. She has so much junk
in there, and her filing systems are in such a mess, that she never can find
anything, and the file drawers and old trunks must be emptied out before
they can be put into any kind of order. If she could only forget, completely,
about nine tenths of the facts and rules she has all mixed up in her head, she
might begin to learn something.

The other day I asked the class to find as many verbs as they could that
ended in p. Marjorie's face grew panicky as I repeated the instructions.
Finally she said, in a near-hysterical voice, "I don't get it." I said, "What
don't you get?"-a useless question, but one I can't break myself of asking.
She said, as I knew she would, "I just don't get it." I repeated the instructions
and asked her to repeat them after me; she did. I then asked if she knew what
a verb was. She said she didn't. (She has been given the definition many
times.) I gave her some examples of verbs, and she breathed a sigh of relief
and went to work. I felt like asking her, "Why didn't you tell me you didn't
know what a verb was?" But after some thought, I realized that until I asked
her, she did not know herself that she did not know what a verb was. All she
knew was that she had been told to start doing something and didn't know
what to do. She was wholly incapable of analyzing the instructions, finding
out what part of them made sense and what did not, where her knowledge
ended and her ignorance began.

Children like Marjorie get in the habit of waiting for teachers to show
them how to do everything, so that they may continue by a process of blind
imitation; they never learn how to get information out of verbal instructions.
In fact, they do not seem to believe that verbal instructions contain
information. They do not expect to be able to figure out from mere words
what it is that one wants them to do. Nor can they distinguish between the
goal and the route needed to get there, the job to be done, and the method
needed to do it. If someone gives them a problem, they either know or don't
know "how to do it." If they don't, the problem itself is meaningless to them.

And this is the great danger of asking children to manipulate symbols

whose concrete meaning they do not understand. After a while they come to
feel, like Marjorie, that all symbols are meaningless. Our teaching is too full
of words, and they come too soon.

January 26, 1961

I have described (pp. 156-160 ff.) the problem that Dr. Gattegno gave to
his demonstration class of retarded children The other day I gave this
problem to Dorothy, certainly the slowest child I have ever taught. Until
now, every child who has tried the problem has done it in one or two tries;
she took five or six before she said, "I see what you're doing." When she was
able to find the correct rod to fill the empty space, without trial and error or
even hesitation, I said, "You're getting too hard to trick," and switched to
another game.

Some teachers would wonder what is the point of this kind of game. First,
and most important, it gives this child a problem that she can solve, on her
own, without help from outside and without recourse to formulae, devices,
or recipes dimly remembered and never understood; secondly, it enables her
to grasp a fundamental fact about the way in which physical objects behave,
a fact which, up until now, she has never grasped, i.e., the behavior of
inanimate objects is consistent and reliable, rather than whimsical and
unpredictable.

It is easy to feel sometimes that such children have duller senses. It's as if
they do not see what we see. Once I asked Dorothy to tell me what rod was
the same length as six (or four, or some other number) white rods. Quite
often she would take a rod that was two or three centimeters too long or too
short, and not be sure that it would not fit until she had carefully put it beside
the white rods. Did her senses send her no message until that moment? Or is
it that she was afraid to trust such messages as her senses did send?

With enough time, it might be possible to go back to the beginning and

rebuild this child's intelligence. Just as mathematics, improperly used, has
helped to destroy it, so, properly used, it could help to rebuild it. But this
could not be done unless the outside world left her alone while she was
learning to make sense of things, and did not try to make her appear to know
what she did not know, and did not try to make her feel foolish or ashamed
for knowing so little. Clearly this is too much to ask.

To "rebuild this child's intelligence" is the wrong phrase, and a bad phrase.
We did more than enough harm in school when we thought we were only
teaching facts. If the day comes when we think our task is to build or rebuild
intelligence, we will do far more harm. Human beings are born intelligent.
We are by nature question-asking, answer-making, problem-solving animals,
and we are extremely good at it, above all when we are little. But under
certain conditions, which may exist anywhere and certainly exist almost all
of the time in almost all schools, we stop using our greatest intellectual
powers, stop wanting to use them, even stop believing that we have them.

The remedy is not to think of more and more tricks for "building
intelligence," but to do away with the conditions that make people act
stupidly, and instead make available to them a wide variety of situations in
which they are likely once again to start acting intelligently. The mind and
spirit, like the body, will heal itself of most wounds if we do not keep tearing
them open to make sure they are healing.

That class was indeed very valuable to Dorothy. In her first six years of
school she had done, according to the school's tests and measurements,
about half a year's worth of schoolwork each year. In this class she did a
whole year's worth. But it was not because I taught her a lot of wonderful
stuff or rebuilt her intelligence. The fact was that I taught her very little,
spent very little time working with her; it was not until late winter that I felt
she was enough at home and unafraid in the class so that I could begin to do
some work with her.

What helped her was the fact that, certainly compared with most school
classes, our class was a lively, interesting, cooperative, and generally
unthreatening place. Freed from her worries about getting into trouble and
looking stupid, she was able after a while to come up out of her self-dug
hole, look around, and see what was going on. She had not been in the class
more than a couple of months when her mother called me one day to thank
me for all I had done for her. Since I had spent almost no time working with
her, and since her school- work remained atrocious, I was not sure what the
mother meant. Like my students, I fished for a clue. Her mother told me that
for six years Dorothy had come home from school silent, and remained
silent all through the evenings. Now, she said, Dorothy gets into the car
talking, and talks all the way home and right through the evening. About
what? About her gifted teacher, Mr. Holt? Not at all. She talked about all the
interesting things that were said and done by the other children in the class.
That was where she got her food for thought.

Of course, I am happy to give myself some credit for allowing and in some
ways helping this to happen. But I was not "rebuilding Dorothy's
intelligence," and the most valuable parts of the school day for her were not
the hours during which she was working with me.

January 30, 1961

I asked Andy to make five piles of white rods, with eight in each pile; any
small object would have done as well. Then I gave him eight paper cups, and
asked him to divide the white rods evenly among the cups. A child who
understood multiplication would have known right away that 5 rods were
needed for each cup. A somewhat less able child might have said, "5 X 8 =
40; I have 40 rods; if I divide them up among 8 cups I will have 5 rods in
each cup." Andy did neither. He started by trying to put 8 rods in each cup,
ran out of rods, and said, "That won't work." Then he put 4 rods in each cup,
which gave him 8 rods left over. I thought he would distribute these among
the 8 cups; to my amazement he emptied all the cups and started all over.
Then he tried to put 6 rods in each cup; not enough rods. Then he tried 5
rods per cup, which worked.

One of the beauties of this kind of work is that Andy had no idea, as he
struggled toward the solution, that he was making mistakes. In his clumsy
way he was doing a piece of research, and without having to be told that it
was so, he saw that every unsuccessful attempt brought him closer to the
answer he sought. What was, for a fifth-grader, a very poor piece of
mathematical work, gave him no feeling of failure or shame, but instead a
lively satisfaction, something he rarely gets in school.

Ted did some division problems. Given 86 to divide by 2, he had no

trouble: 2 into 8 gives 4, 2 into 6 gives 3, so the answer is 43. But when
given 96 to divide by 2, he did exactly the same thing: 2 into 9 gives 4, with
1 left over; 2 into 6 gives 3. Again he wrote 43 for the answer. What to do
with that leftover 1 he had not the faintest idea. I asked him to divide 55 by
5. His answer was 11. Then 65. Same answer. Then 75. Same answer. Then
85 and 95. Same answer. He was somewhat uneasy about this, because he
said defensively, as if justifying himself, "9 divided by 5 is 1, 5 divided by 5
is 1." But he could not get himself out of the jam.

We did some division by distributing rods among paper cups: I gave him 5
orange (10) and 2 white (1) rods, and asked him to divide them evenly
among 4 paper cups. Right away he put 1 orange rod in each cup; then he
asked me to give him 10 whites in place of the orange rod he had left over.
He then distributed his 12 whites among the four cups, and thus got the
correct answer--13.

He did a number of problems like this. Each time he had one or more
orange rods left over after he had divided them up among the cups, and each
time he asked me to change these leftover rods into whites. Now and then,
before giving him his change, I would ask him if he could tell how many of
these whites each of his paper cups would get. Quite often he could tell me.
Thus, dividing 32 by 2, he put an orange rod in each cup, and then told me,
after I had asked him, that the remaining 12 white rods could be divided up 6
to a cup, so that each cup would get a total of 16. But when the divisor was
larger than 2 he was uneasy when asked this question, and he never asked it
of himself. Each time he wanted all his change in whites, which he
painstakingly divided up to get his answer.
 This is as it should be. When children are doing concrete operations like
this, doing things that they feel are sensible, getting answers by themselves,
answers that they can be sure are right, there is much to be said for letting
them use a cumbersome method until they feel thoroughly secure in it,
before suggesting the possibility that there may be an easier way. It is often
said that children find security in drill, in repetitive work. In this kind of
situation, where the child is in command, master of his materials and sure of
what he is doing, the statement is probably correct. But not one percent of
school drill is work of this nature. It is mumbo-jumbo, and 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,
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.

Seymour Papert, in Mindstorms (Basic Books, 1980), which is about how

computers (though only if very different from present ones) might be used
by children to gain a much clearer insight into their own mathematical
thinking, points out the very important difference between "drill" and
"practice." Practice you do for yourself, to get better at something you want
or need to do. Drill you do for other people, perhaps so they can check up on
you to make sure you know what you are supposed to, perhaps only so they
can keep you busy.

Was I doing practice or drill with this boy? Mostly drill, I'm afraid. I liked
him, and he knew it, and on the whole I think he liked and trusted me.
Certainly he was having more fun in this class than he had ever before had in
school, and was doing better. But I never saw him doing by himself any of
these clever things I did with him. And that may well be one of the reasons
why none of the things he learned while working with me ever stuck, why
we had to go over the same ground day after day, week after week.

What I was doing with him, trying to make things easy for him, was a kind
of programmed instruction. As long as I was there to ask the questions, he
could in time, with some trial and error, usually figure out how to give me
the answers 1 wanted. But like the eleventh-grader I spoke of, he could
never remember the questions. He could (if I went slowly enough) follow
me down the trail, but he could never find the trail himself. I wanted to give
him, for his own use, a way of using the rods to do and check various
operations in the world of numbers. But he never internalized, never took
possession of any of these ideas. They remained mine.

The whole idea of his learning to do division was mine. He didn't want to
learn it, had no use for it--just as I, outside the schoolroom, have never had a
use for it. It was something he had to do only to please or satisfy me. He
may have had a shrewd intuition that if he could just once satisfy me that he
knew how to do division, no one else would ever bother him about it, which
would almost certainly have been true.

February 3, 1961

Poor Marjorie has tried her best to remember everything anyone has ever
told her in school, without being able to make any sense out of any of it,
perhaps without even feeling that there was any sense to be made. For her
pains, she has a headful of scrambled facts and recipes, few if any of them
available on demand, and no idea in the world which of them may be
applicable to any given situation.

The other day she asked if she could work with me and the rods. I said
"Sure." First we did the color-rectangle problem: I put some rods together,
side by side, to make a rectangle; then I asked her to make a rectangle of the
same size, all one color, but using a different color from mine. She saw
quickly that it could be done with whites, and soon could do it with other
colors as well.

"I put some rods together..." I still think this is a pretty good game or
puzzle to do with the rods, if you are using them. The next year I made, out
of the cardboard the laundry used to put in shirts (when we sent shirts to a
laundry), a number of shallow cardboard boxes, all 1 cm deep, and with
different lengths and width-3 cm X 5 cm, 4 cm X 7 cm, etc. I would give
these to children and ask them to fill them up in different ways--rods of one
color rods of many colors, rods of two colors but with the same number of
rods of each color, and so on. Young children might find such puzzles quite
interesting to do, for many reasons. The people who make the rods might be
wise to make, out of molded plastic, an assortment of such boxes. But
they're very easy to make out of cardboard or tag-board.

While working she said something that she was to say again many times
during the sessions that we worked together--and the written word fails
dismally to convey the joy and excitement in her voice--"Oh, this is neat! I
love it when you get the trick!"

A day or so later I challenged her to make a rectangle of rods, all one

color, such that I could not cover it with a different color (excluding white).
After much trial and error she found that she could defeat me with squares of
3, 5, or 7 cm. From this she concluded that one of 9 cm would do as well,
and was surprised when I was able to cover it with light green (3) rods. She
did not see that prime numbers were what was needed; but then, though we
have been working with prime numbers for weeks, she hasn't a notion of
what a prime number is.

Again and again she said how neat it was to get the trick. This is the phrase
which she (and not she alone) uses to describe the feeling of having worked
something out for yourself and having understood what you did. For all but a
few kids in the class, it is an experience so unique that they think of it as
having nothing to do with school.

Later we played the division game with paper cups. Like the other
children, Marjorie distributed among the cups as many orange and white
rods as she could distribute evenly, and then made change with what was
left. She liked this game very much, and today had some races with Anna,
who is, on the whole, a quicker math student.

These kids would undoubtedly say, if asked, that they were doing division;
but they do not think of it that way to themselves, and they do not apply
what few division facts they do know. Every time they go through the
complicated rigmarole of making change. This suggests that even if we get
smart enough to let children do arithmetic operations in the concrete before
doing them with symbols--and to get schools and teachers to this point will
not be easy--we must still beware of trying to force children into too quick
generalizations about what they have been doing. Instead we must find
situations in which they will want to find better methods of performing these
concrete operations like the division races between Marjorie and Anna-so
that, in the search for better methods, they will make generalizations of their
own.

For example, imagine a child who does not know that 42 divided by 3 is
14, and has no recipe for getting the answer. We give him 4 orange and 2
white rods, to divide evenly among 3 cups. He puts an orange rod in each
cup, exchanges his remaining orange rod for 10 whites, distributes the l2
whites among the 3 cups, and finds that each cup has 14. He will do this
many times before he sees that, when he has that leftover orange and 2
whites to divide among three cups, he can do the rest of the problem in his
head without having to go to the trouble of making change.

The other day I thought I could force this process. When a child asked me
to change an orange rod into whites, I asked him instead if he could tell me,
without actually making the change and using the rods, how many whites
each cup would get. If the division factor was one he knew, he could usually
tell me; but it never occurred to him to do it when I did not ask the question.
Left alone, he went back to his old system, in which he felt that he knew
what he was doing.

We cannot overestimate the importance of this. The idea of doing the

dividing mentally rather than with white rods did not stick in the minds of
these children because it was my idea, not theirs; there was no place for it in
their minds; it did not meet any felt intellectual need. We must not fool
ourselves, as for years I fooled myself, into thinking that guiding children to
answers by carefully chosen leading questions is in any important respect
different from just telling them the answers in the first place. Children who
have been led up to answers by teachers' questions are later helpless unless
they can remember the questions, or ask themselves similar questions, and
this is exactly what they cannot do. The only answer that really sticks in a
child's mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of
himself.

Yesterday we played a different game. I gave Marjorie 2 white rods, and

asked how many differently shaped rectangles she could make by putting
them together. She saw that there was only one. I added a rod, making 3
rods, and asked her again. Again, only one-way to make it. With 4 rods,
there were two possible rectangles, a 1 X 4 and a 2 x 2. And so we worked
our way up to 20, finding the factors of each number along the way, and
noting which numbers were prime. At no time on the way up to 20 did it
occur to Marjorie, or the generally more able Anna, that they could solve the
problem by making use of what little they knew about factors. Given 10
rods, they did not think, "We can make a rectangle 5 rods long and 2 wide";
they had to work by trial and error each time. But they did get progressively
quicker at seeing which combinations were possible and which were not.

I did not see until later that this increased quick ness and skill was the
beginning, the seed of a generalized understanding. An example comes to
mind, that was repeated many times. When the children had 12 rods, they
made a 6 x 2 rectangle. Then both of them divided that rectangle in half and
put the halves together to make a 4 x 3 rectangle. As they worked, their
attack on the problem became more economical and organized. They were a
long way from putting their insights and understandings into words, but they
were getting there. The essential is that this sort of process not be rushed.

This work has changed most of my ideas about the way to use Cuisenaire
rods and other materials. It seemed to me at first that we could use them as
devices for packing in recipes much faster than before, and many teachers
seem to be using them this way. But this is a great mistake. What we ought
to do is use these materials to enable children to make for themselves, out of
their own experience and discoveries, a solid and growing understanding of
the ways in which numbers and the operations of arithmetic work. Our aim
must be to build soundly, and if this means that we must build more slowly,
so be it. Some things we will be able to do much earlier than we used
fractions, for example. Others, like long division, may have to be put off
until later. The work of the children themselves will tell us.

As I wrote in issues No. 4 and No. 6 of Growing Without Schooling, and

have been saying to teachers for four or five years now, if we think we have
to "teach" children what the schools call "basic arithmetic facts," e.g., that 3
+ 4 = 7 and 5 x 4 = 20, a better way to do it is by having them discover for
themselves, by experiment, as these two girls were doing, some of the basic
properties of numbers. The statement that 3 + 2 = 5 is best understood, not
as a statement about addition which someone invented and which can be
learned only be being memorized, but as a statement about one property of
the number 5. This property, that a group of five objects may be split up into
a group of three objects and another of two objects, is not a human invention
but a fact of nature. The statement 3 + 2 = 5 is only one of several ways to
write and talk about this fact of nature.
 One of several? The others are 2 + 3 = 5, 5 - 2 = 3, and 5 - 3 = 2. All four
of these statements, which the schools usually teach as separate and
unconnected facts, to be memorized separately, can and should be
understood as different ways of talking about one fact, the fact of nature just
mentioned, that from a group of five objects we can make a group of three
objects and a group of two objects.

But that fact of nature is something that children can discover themselves.
They don't have to take it on faith and hang on to it through blind memory.
They can use the real world and their own senses to find it out, check it, and
find it out again as many times as they have to. However, let me emphasize
once again the "if" in "lf we think we have to leach children these facts .. ."
We must not assume that if we did not teach these facts no child would ever
learn them. Nor should we assume that once we have shown children how
they can find this basic property of the number 5 they will then choose to
spend much time trying to find the properties of many other numbers. For
most children it will not be an interesting task.

What is most important from the point of view of understanding arithmetic

is the basic idea that statements like 4 + 3 = 7 and 9 x 5 = 45 are statements
about the real world, which we can use the reel world to check if and when
we want to. Having once satisfied the children (or ourselves) that this can be
done, there is no good reason to spend much time doing it.

7 March 11, 1961

Dorothy was working with me the other day. I have been trying to get to
the bottom of her misunderstanding of numbers so that I might find some
solid ground to start building on. I think we may have touched the bottom,
but it was a long way down.

On the table I made 2 rows of white rods, 5 in each row. As I made them, I
said, "Here are 2 rows, same number of rods in each row." She agreed. I
asked how many rods I had used to make these 2 rows. She said 10. I wrote
10 on a piece of paper beside us and put a check beside it. Then I made 2
rows of 7. She agreed that the rows were equal, and told me, when I asked,
that I had used 14 rods to make them. She had to count them, of course. I
wrote 14 and put a check beside it.
 Then I said, "Now you make some." She pushed my rows back into the
pile, and then brought out some rods, with which she made 2 rows of 6. I
asked how many she had used, and she counted up to 12. I wrote this down
and put a check beside it. Then I asked her to see if she could make 2 rows
with the same number in each row and no rods left over, using 11 rods. She
pushed her 10 rods back into the pile, then counted out 11 rods from the pile
and tried to make them into 2 equal rows. After a while she said, "It won't
work." I agreed that it wouldn't, wrote down 11, and put a big X beside it.

Then I said, "Some numbers work, like 10 and 14, and others don't, like
11. I'd like you to start with 6, and tell me which numbers work and which
ones don't." After what we had been doing, these instructions were clear.
She counted out 6 rods, which she made into 2 rows of 3. I wrote down 6
and checked it. Then I got my first surprise. Instead of bringing out one
more rod to give herself 7, she pushed all of them back into the pile, then
counted out 7 rods, and tried to make 2 equal rows out of them. After a
while she said, "It won't work." I wrote 7, with an X beside it. Then she
pushed all the rods back into the pile, counted out 8, made 2 rows of 4, and
said "8 works." Then she pushed them all back, counted out 9, could not
make 2 rows, and told me so. And she followed exactly this procedure all
the way up to about 14.

Then she made a big step. Having done 14, she brought out another rod to
make 15, and merely added that rod to one of the rows, before telling me
that 15 would not work. Again she left her rows, this time adding another
rod to the short row, before telling me that 16 would work. This more
efficient process she continued up into the early 20's-about 24, I think. Then,
having found that 24 would work, she said, but without using the rods, "25
won't work." I wrote it, and she continued thus, with increasing speed and
confidence, until we got to about 36. At this point she stopped naming the
odd numbers altogether, saying only "36 works, 38 works, 40 works..." and
so on up into the 50's, where we stopped.

We rested a bit, fooled around with the rods, did a little building with
them, and then went on to the next problem. This time I made 3 equal rows,
and asked her to find what numbers, beginning with 6, would work for this
problem. To my surprise, she could not arrange 6 rods in 3 equal rows,
arranging them instead in a 3-2-1 pattern. I helped her out, and she began to
work. From the start she moved one step ahead of where she had been on the
e-row problem. When I had made 6 rods into 3 rows of 2, and had written
that 6 worked, she added a rod to one of the rows, told me that 7 would not
work, added a rod to another row, told me that 8 would not work, added a
rod to another row, and told me that 9 would work. In this way we worked
our way up to about 15 or 18. Here she stopped using the rods, and said,"l9
doesn't work, 20 doesn't work, 21 works..." and so on. When she got up to
about 27, she just gave me the numbers that worked--30, 33, 36, and 39.

In the 4-row problem we began with 8 rods. She used the rods to tell me
that 9, 10, and Il would not work, and that 12 would. Without the rods, she
told me that 13, 14, and 15 would not work, and that 16 would; from there
she began counting by fours--20, 24, 28, 32, etc. In the 5-row problem we
began with 10 rods, and after using the rods to get to 15 she went on from
there counting by fives.

People to whom I have described this child's work have found it all but
impossible to believe. They could not imagine that even the most wildly
unsuccessful student could have so little mathematical insight, or would use
such laborious and inefficient methods to solve so simple a problem. The
fact remains that this is what the child did. There is no use in we teachers
telling ourselves that such children ought to know more, ought to understand
better, ought to be able to work more efficiently; the facts are what count.
The reason this poor child has learned hardly anything in six years of school
is that no one ever began where she was just as the reason she was able to
make such extraordinary gains in efficiency and understanding during this
session is that, beginning where she was, she was learning genuinely and on
her own.

Though I have many reservations today about much of the work I did with
my fifth-grade classes, I am still very pleased with this day's work with
Dorothy. I don't think that she, any more than Ted, was internalizing, taking
possession of, making her own, much of what I was showing her. But at
least she was having the experience of solving problems that she understood,
and knowing from the evidence of her senses that she had solved them. At
least she was feeling some of the power of her own mind. The problem, my
problem, probably seemed pointless and ridiculous to her, but the solution
was hers.

I think it would be foolish, a waste of time, and often harmful to ask all
young children to do these tasks, take them through these procedures. But
they might be very useful in helping people (children or adults) for whom
even simple arithmetic has always been a terrifying mystery, to make some
sense out of it, and more important, to realize that even when we can't for
the moment see the sense of it, mathematics is basically sensible.

I suspect that adults who have always had trouble with basic arithmetic
and feel afraid of it might find that if they did for themselves some of the
exercises described here, they might soon see some of the sense in arithmetic
and feel a lot better. Like Marjorie, they might find that they too "love it
when they get the trick."

No need to use anything as expensive as Cuisenaire rods to do such work.

Any small objects would do - matches (used), toothpicks, and bits of paper
or cardboard.

March 20, 1961

A number of the children have worked on a problem that could be stated

thus: "Find what numbers of squares can be arranged in a rectangle that is
more than one square in width." Clearly, every number except the prime
numbers will work for this problem. The other day I turned it into a new and
subtler problem by saying that there had to be a hole, the size of one of the
squares, in the exact middle of the rectangle. An able student, like Terry,
attacks the problem systematically. He began by trying to make the smallest
possible rectangle with a hole in the center, in short, by having just one
thickness of squares all around the hole. To do this took 8 squares. Then he
considered how this rectangle could grow into a larger one, while keeping
the hole in the middle. He soon saw that any such rectangle must have sides
with odd lengths--3 X 5, 7 X 3, etc. In another moment he could say, in
general, and without any further construction, which numbers would work
and which would not.

A slow student, like Andy, will attack the problem in an entirely different
way. He took 16 rods, made a 4 X 4 square, and then spent a long time
trying to remove one rod so that the hole would be in the middle, but no
matter how he shuffled the rods around, the hole was always in the wrong
place. It was fun to watch him struggle with this; his failure to get that hole
to go where he wanted exasperated him, but--what is unusual for him--it did
not frighten him. He was working boldly and determinedly. Eventually, he
saw that he would have to have a rectangle of odd dimensions before the
problem would work. Even then, he did not see that any such rectangle
would do. Compared with the way Terry tackled the problem, his method
could be called clumsy and inefficient; but the vital point is that it was his
method, exactly suited to his own store of mathematical learning and insight;
and because it was his own, he was learning from it.

With thought, practice, and luck we should be able to devise problems that
children can do in ways which, being their own, will be of use to them. Such
problems could make up a kind of self-adjusting learning-machine, in which
the child himself makes the program harder as he becomes more skillful. But
this approach to mathematical learning, and other kinds as well, will require
teachers to stop thinking of the way or the best way to solve problems. We
must recognize that children who are dealing with a problem in a very
primitive, experimental, and inefficient level, are making discoveries that are
just as good, just as exciting, just as worthy of interest and encouragement,
as the more sophisticated discoveries made by more advanced students.
When Dorothy discovers, after long painful effort, that every other number
can be divided into 2 equal rows, that every third number can be divided into
3 equal rows, she has made just as great an intellectual leap as those children
who, without being told, discovered for themselves some of the laws of
exponents.

In other words, the invention of the wheel was as big a step forward as the
invention of the airplane-- bigger, in fact. We teachers will have to learn to
recognize when our students are, mathematically speaking, inventing wheels
and when they are inventing airplanes; and we will have to learn to be as
genuinely excited and pleased by wheel inventors as by airplane inventors.
Above all, we will have to avoid the difficult temptation of showing slow
students the wheel so that they may more quickly get to work on the
airplanes. In mathematics certainly, and very probably in all subjects,
knowledge which is not genuinely discovered by children will very likely
prove useless and will be soon forgotten.
 These puzzles or problems, about making rectangles, or rectangles with
holes in the middle, were quite interesting to the children-- interesting, at
least, as schoolwork goes. I doubt very much that any of them ever did, or
that any children ever would, spend much of their own time doing such
puzzles. But for a school class they were not too bad. And like some of the
other activities I have described they might be interesting and useful to some
math-fearing children or adults.

Some very important mathematical work has grown out of equally humble
beginnings, like the study of polyominoes--shapes you can make by putting
squares together. (See examples.)

Of course, to work on polyominoes, or the kinds of puzzles I gave my

class, you don't need

Cuisenaire rods--squares cut out of paper or cardboard will do as well.

May 6, 1961

A very skillful public relations job has been done for the so-called new
math. Everyone talks about it, and any school or teacher who isn't doing it
seems hopelessly old-fashioned. Some of this new math is really very good.
Here and there, truly revolutionary and constructive changes in math
teaching are being made; children are finding out things for themselves
instead of being told answers or hinted toward them with leading questions.
But these places are few. Most of the new math is just what the bad old math
was - cookbookery. The difference is that the cook- books are newer, more
up to date-which may be a good thing, if cookbookery is what you want.
Some of the cookbooks are not only newer, but better; but many, including
some of the most highly touted, lavishly financed, and widely used, are not.
Some I have examined are unclearly written; they contain many ambiguities;
their examples are often ill chosen; they assume understandings that many
children don't have; they do not make sufficiently strong the bridge between
the known and real and the un- known and symbolic; they have too much
material in them; they are too disconnected, too linear, too answer-directed.
They are, in short, not worth all the fuss that is being made over them, and
some of the children I know who are using them are as confused, baffled,
and frightened as ever.

Seymour Papert, professor of mathematics and of education at MIT, in

Mindstorms, has this to say about the new math:

The New Math curriculum reform of the sixties made some attempt to
change the content of school math. But it could not go very far. It was stuck
with having to do sums, albeit different sums. The fact that the new sums
dealt with sets instead of numbers, or arithmetic in base two instead of base
ten made little difference. Moreover, the math reform did not provide a
challenge to the inventiveness of creative mathematicians and so never
acquired the sparkle of excitement that marks the product of new thought.
The name itself-"New Math"--was a misnomer. There was very little new
about its mathematical content: It did not come from a process of invention
of children's mathematics but from a process of trivialization of
mathematician's mathematics.

But even if the new math had been good, and a few little bits of it were, it
would never have made any fundamental changes in the way math was
taught in school as long as teachers were told, as they were, that they had to
do new math in their classes whether they liked it or not. The only way to
get new ideas and ways of teaching into classrooms is to say to teachers,
"Here is an idea we think you might like, and if--and only if--you do, you
might think about using some of it in your work with the children." It was
exactly in this spirit that Bill Hull and I were introduced to the Cuisenaire
rods. Nobody at the school told us to use them, or even to look into them. It
was our idea to go to a meeting where Gattegno talked about them; and it
was our idea to order some for our classes and try to figure out good ways to
use them.

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. As things stand, many teachers
who try to do such research and use the results in their teaching get into
trouble--even when their new methods get better results. There is no way to
compel teachers to do such research, and indeed for some time to come the
majority of teachers will not want to do it, preferring to have others tell them
what to do and so take the responsibility if it fails. But those teachers who
want to use their own classrooms to find better ways of teaching, as I did,
should have every possible encouragement. None of the three schools in
which I worked after 1958 gave me much encouragement or support in my
efforts to find better ways of teaching, even when the results were
demonstrably good and in some cases strikingly so.

Children cannot learn much from cookbooks, even the best cookbooks. A
child learns, at any moment, not by using the procedure that seems best to
us, but the one that seems best to him; by fitting into his structure of ideas
and relationships, his mental model of reality, not the piece we think comes
next, but the one he thinks comes next. This is hard for teachers to learn, and
hardest of all for the skillful and articulate, the kind often called "gifted."
The more aware we are of the structural nature of our own ideas, the more
we are tempted to try to transplant this structure whole into the minds of
children. But it cannot be done. They must do this structuring and building
for themselves. I may see that fact A and fact B are connected by a
relationship C, but I can't make this connection for a child by talking about
it. He may remember the facts and what I said about the relationship
between them, but he is very likely to turn my words into three facts, A, B,
and C, none of them connected to any other.

For example, consider that 2 X 9 = 18 and 2 X 10 = 20. Most children, and

many teachers, see these as unrelated facts; schools and textbooks are used
to talking about the 100 facts of multiplication. But these facts are joined by
the relationship that ten 2's must be 2 more than nine 2's. Knowing this, I
know that 1000 X 2 must be 2 more than 999 X 2, and thus I know, without
having to multiply, that 999 x 2 must equal 2000 - 2, or 1998. But I have
found, over and over again, when I tried to point out this relationship to
students, that many of them took it in, if at all, only as a third, rather
complicated fact, that had nothing to do with the others. A child must
discover for himself that if, for example, 2 X 75 = 150, then 2 x 74 must
equal 150 - 2, or 148. Until he does, no amount of talk will enable him to
make that step, far less make use of this understanding to see that since 3 X
50 = 150, 3 X 49 must equal 150 -- 3, or 147.

It has seemed to me for a long time that, though children are very good at
inductive reasoning, at making generalizations from specific cases, they are
poor at deductive reasoning, since even the best students can rarely give
examples of any generalizations they happen to know. But the reason
children can use so few of the generalizations they hear in school is that
these generalizations are not theirs, and were never connected to reality in
the first place. The kind of concrete math problems I have been describing
gave children the chance to make generalizations, which though crude were
really their own, and therefore usable--a foundation on which they could
build. But it was hard at first to see how to apply these problems, which I
had used for diagnostic purposes, to the task of teaching that conventional
arithmetic curriculum--numbers and operations with them. Then I saw the
work of Professor Z. P. Dienes, a British mathematician and teacher, then
working at Harvard, and new possibilities began to open up.

Professor Dienes has developed a way of teaching math that he calls the
Math Laboratory. It was first used widely in the schools of Leicestershire
and has been used since then in many other places.

Children are given various kinds of materials, and a variety of experiments

to make with them: to find how many of one piece are needed to make
another, or how to use pieces of one shape to make another shape, and so
forth. No one tells them how to do these things; they figure it out for
themselves. If an experiment is too hard, they try an easier one. As they get
their answers, they write them down. In time, they start to see that what they
do at one time is rather like what they did at another. They begin to see
similarities and make generalizations until, eventually; they can do certain
problems without having to use the materials at all. Then they can be said to
know the principle embodied in the problem.

These materials and experiments are most varied and ingenious. Children
find them so interesting and such fun to work that, in the Leicestershire
schools, one can often see a roomful of forty young children, even as young
as seven years old, working intently each on his own experiment, sometimes
with no teacher in the room at all. Some of these materials enable children to
learn what few children know here-the meaning and use of base and place in
a positional numeral system (ours is such a system, with a base of 10). Other
Math Lab materials deal with quite different matters, including some that
would be considered by most people much too difficult for the very children
who have worked them with ease and pleasure.

There is no reason why, using these materials, the Cuisenaire rods, and
other aids that mathematicians and ingenious teachers can invent, we could
not teach all of arithmetic, and many other things besides, by the laboratory
method. It will take time to find out what sort of materials are most
interesting to children, and carry the most mathematical meaning; what sort
of experiments can be done by children with the greatest pleasure and with
the least possible instruction, interference, and correction by the teacher. But
such matters of detail and practice can easily be worked out by schools or
teachers who understand the general method and the principles behind it--
who are more interested in having children learn something real than in
having them get good marks on tests. In such schools, math might, in time,
become one of the most popular and constructive courses instead of the most
hated and harmful, a source of real and useful rather than apparent learning,
a nourisher of thought and intelligence rather than a destroyer of them.

As you can see, I was very excited about the idea of the Math Laboratory,
about some of Dienes's own materials, and about the possibility that if we
put the right materials in front of children and suggested things to do with
them, the children might not only learn but love math. In other words, I
hoped we might do with such materials what Seymour Papert in Mindstorms
believes and hopes we may someday do with a certain kind of computers.

One of the things the British public elementary schools and later our own
were most eager to have children learn was the meaning of base and place in
our numeral system. They felt that if children really understood these, they
would not only not make a lot of the ridiculous mistakes that many of them
make in arithmetic, but would see the logic of, and so remember, all the
operations in the school math curriculum.

To help them learn this, Dienes invented and had manufactured what he
called multi-based blocks. Sets of these were available for bases 2, 3, 4, 5,
and 10. A single set for the base 10 contained a number of unit cubes, little
wooden cubes, 3/8" On a side; a number of wooden ships, 3/8" wide and ten
times that long, representing the number 10; a number of wooden squares,
3/8" high and ten times that long on each side; and some wooden cubes,
representing the number 1000, which were 10 units long on each side.

A set for the base 2 contained unit cubes, again 3/8" on a side; strips 2
units long; squares 1 unit high and 2 units on a side; and cubes 2 units on
each side. And so for the other bases, 3, 4, and 5.

The idea was that the children would do "experiments," which were in fact
arithmetic problems, but that they would use these concrete materials to
figure out and check their own answers. In short, they would learn from the
materials. Very excited by the possibilities of this, I ordered multi-based
blocks (which I paid for myself) and the experiment cards that went with
them. When they finally arrived I put them out in the classroom, told the
students about the experiment cards, and said that they could decide for
themselves, which experiments they wanted to do.

On the whole, at least at first, the children seemed to like these new
gadgets, and I waited for all this good independent math learning to begin. In
no time at all I got a rude shock. When I looked at the first "experiment
results"--i.e., answers--I saw that with few exceptions these answers were
not only wrong but absurd. These expensive and supposedly self-teaching
materials had in fact taught them nothing. I was right back where 1 had been
with Edward, Dorothy, and the others.

Nor were the children interested for very long in doing these experiments.
They were a good deal less interesting than the puzzles and problems I had
invented for them to do - which isn't saying much.

I waited awhile for things to improve, thought that if the children used the
multi-based blocks for a while they would learn better how to learn from
them. But nothing improved. Children who already understood base and
place, even if only intuitively, could see the connections between written
numerals and operations with numerals and these blocks. Children, who
could convert 101 in base 2, or 322 in base 4, or whatever, to the equivalent
number in base 10, without using blocks, could use the blocks to do the same
thing, or to verify their answer. But children who could not do these
problems without the blocks didn't have a clue about how to do them with
the blocks.

Thus, children who already knew that the base 2 cube was equivalent to 8
units, or the base 4 cube to 64 units, etc., could easily verify for themselves
that this was so. But the children for whom this was not obvious were
perfectly willing to say that the base 4 cube had 211 units or 83 units or any
other absurd number that might pop into their minds. They found the blocks,
as Edward had found the Cuisenaire rods, as abstract, as disconnected from
reality, mysterious, arbitrary, and capricious as the numbers that these blocks
were supposed to bring to life.

So I decided to retire the multi-based blocks. This was easy to do. When I
stopped urging the children to use the blocks, they soon stopped using them.
I left them in the room, where any who wanted to could get hold of them,
but no one did. Luckily, unlike most teachers, I was free to drop what did
not work. No one was leaning over my shoulder telling me I damn well had
to use these materials whether I wanted to or not.

I decided I would develop my own math materials. Bill Hull and I, and
many others we knew, were much impressed by what we had learned of the
work of the "open" primary schools in Leicestershire. We felt that these
changes had come about largely as the result of the county advisors, resource
people whose task it was simply to make new ideas and materials available
to teachers, and to give as much help as they could to any teachers who
asked for it.
I thought to myself that if I could be a math advisor in a school, I might
influence the teaching of math throughout the entire school, instead of just in
my own class. I proposed this to the school. The school said okay but that
they would pay me only half a salary for this work (about $2000--which of
course was worth much more in 1962 than now).

I see now that the school was far less interested in this research than I was,
and perhaps also a little relieved to get me out of a regular classroom. A year
later they were to tell me that, yes, I could still do this research in the school,
but that I would have to raise the money for it myself, they couldn't pay me
anything. For a year I worked for nothing--there was no money, then or now,
to support the kind of small-scale, in-place research I was doing. After that
year, needing a paycheck, I asked for my old fifth-grade job back and was
told that I couldn't have it.

But even if the school had been willing to pay for it, I think the idea of
trying to be an advisor or resource person for the school was a mistake. It
was not clever materials, or puzzles, or teaching ideas that had made my
class a better place for the children, where they had learned more than they
had learned before, but the fact that it was a different kind of human
situation. And it was not as an inventor of clever materials that I was of most
use to these children, but as a human being who had done a few interesting
things in his life, who had many interests, who loved books, reading,
writing, sports, and above all music, who was generally fairly kindly and
patient with them but who could now and then get very angry, who did not
pretend to be something other than what he was, but generally said what he
thought and showed what he felt, and who above all generally liked,
enjoyed, trusted, and respected them. Almost any adult who felt and acted
that way would have done about as well.

I'm not very enthusiastic about any of these kinds of materials anymore. If
I were teaching a class, or teaching children at home, or running a resource
center for children, I would be glad to have some Cuisenaire rods around, if
someone gave them to me, but if I had to buy them with my own money
there are many things I would rather buy first.

What then should we do about making the world of numbers and math
accessible, interesting, and understandable to children?

A few good principles to keep in mind: (1) Children do not need to be

"taught" in order to learn; they will learn a great deal, and probably learn
best, without being taught. (2) Children are enormously interested in our
adult world and what we do there. (3) Children learn best when the things
they learn are embedded in a context of real Life, are part of what George
Dennison, in The Lives of Children, called "the continuum of experience."
(4) Children learn best when their learning is connected with an immediate
and serious purpose.
 What this means in the field of numbers and math is simply this: the more
we can make it possible for children to see how we use numbers, and to use
them as we use them, the better.

What do we adults do with numbers? We measure things with them, a

huge variety of things in the real world around us. Why? So that we can
think better about them and make better use of them. We measure, among a
host of other reasons, to find out whether we are sick or well; to find out
whether we are doing something better than we did before; to find out which
of several ways of doing this is better; to find out how strong we have to
make things in order to make them stand up; to find out where we are, or
where we're going; to find out, if we do a certain thing, what other things are
likely to happen as a result. And so on. We don't measure things out of idle
curiosity. We measure them so that we can decide things about them and do
things with them.

Since all this is inherently interesting and important to us, it will also
interest children.
So we should introduce children to numbers by giving them or making
available to them as many measuring instruments as possible--rulers,
measuring tapes (in both feet and meters), scales, watches and stopwatches,
thermometers, metronomes, barometers, light meters, decibel meters, scales,
and so on. Whatever we measure in our lives and work, we should try to
measure so that children can see us doing it, and we should try to make it
possible for them to measure the same things, and let them know how we are
thinking about the things we have measured.

Children are interested in themselves, their own bodies, their growth,

quickness, and strength. In What Do I Do Monday? I suggested a whole
range of experiments that children might do to measure their own size,
strength, and speed, and how these things change over time and vary with
different conditions. Thus children might measure their own respiration and
pulse rate, then exercise violently for a while, then measure their breathing
and pulse rate again, then measure it at intervals to see how long it takes it to
get down to normal. Or children might do various tests of speed and
strength, running timed distances or lifting weights or doing other exercises,
and see what happens when they try to do this a second time, and how their
performance varies with the amount of rest they have, and how their speed
or strength, and their recovery times, vary from week to week or from month
to month.
 Aside from involving numbers, all this is true science, not the passive
science of the schools where children are told about the wonderful things
that scientists have discovered, or the fake science of other schools where
children do "experiments" to find out what is already well known, or to get
answers which a teacher marks "right" or "wrong."

Children are interested in money, partly because of what they can do with
it in their own lives, partly because of what adults do with it in theirs, and
above all, because adults seem to think it is so important. All children of ten
and many much younger know that adults think, talk, argue, and worry more
about money than almost anything else in their lives.

If I had that fifth-grade class to live with again, I not only would tell them
as much as I could about money in the world, but I would tell them
everything about the money side of my own life--where I get my money,
how I spend it, how I save it, and so on. I would show them financial reports
from the companies in which I own a little stock, monthly bank statements
from my bank, checkbooks, receipts, bills, tax forms - all much easier to do
now, with copying machines everywhere.

Embedded in all of this would be, of course, not only the standard
arithmetic curriculum, but much interesting food for thought about social
studies, politics, economics, and so on.

If I were teaching children at home, I would put all the information about
the family's finances out where all the children could see it. I would let
children know that they could take as active a part as they wanted in the
financial affairs of the family, including balancing check-books, keeping
records, writing checks, paying bills, and so on. Many children might take
no interest in this work, but many others, I suspect most others, would find it
fascinating, and some are doing it already.

In doing this, I would try to put before children some of the basic ideas of
double-entry bookkeeping, which now seems to me not only a fascinating
and beautiful human invention but, along with typing, one of the most
valuable skills a young person can have for living and working in the world.

It might be a fine idea if families kept their financial records as if they

were small corporations or business concerns; many children would surely
be interested in and would want to take some part, perhaps an important part,
in that process.

It would have been perhaps even better if at the school where I taught, as
in the Ny Lille Skole (now Fri Skole) I was to visit in Denmark many years
later, we could have talked about the finances of the school itself, where and
how it got and spent its money, what kinds of records it had to keep and
what kinds of decisions it had to make. It would have been better yet if, as at
the Ny Lille Skole, the children could have had some part in these decisions.

In any case, I hold to my first point, that the best way to expose children to
the world of numbers is to let them see those numbers at work in adult life.

HOW SCHOOLS FAIL

February 27, 1958

A few days ago Nell came up to the desk, and looking at me steadily and
without speaking, as usual, put on the desk her ink copy of the latest
composition. Our rule is that on the ink copy there must be no more than
three mistakes per page, or the page must be copied again. I checked her
paper, and on the first page found five mistakes. I showed them to her, and
told her, as gently as I could, that she had to copy it again, and urged her to
be more careful-- typical teacher's advice. She looked at me, heaved a sigh,
and went back to her desk. She is left-handed, and doesn't manage a pen
very well. I could see her frowning with concentration as she worked and
struggled. Back she came after a while with the second copy. This time the
first page had seven mistakes, and the handwriting was noticeably worse. I
told her to copy it again. Another bigger sigh, and she went back to her desk.
In time the third copy arrived, looking much worse than the second, and with
even more mistakes.

At that point Bill Hull asked me a question, one I should have asked
myself, one we ought all to keep asking ourselves: "Where are you trying to
get, and are you getting there7"

The question sticks like a burr. In school- but where isn't it so?-we so
easily fall into the same trap: the means to an end becomes an end in itself. I
had on my hands this three-mistake rule meant to serve the ends of careful
work and neat compositions. By applying it rigidly was I getting more
careful work and neater compositions? No; I was getting a child who was so
worried about having to recopy her paper that she could not concentrate on
doing it, and hence did it worse and worse, and would probably do the next
papers badly as well.

We need to ask more often of everything we do in school, "Where are we

trying to get, and is this thing we are doing helping us to get there?" Do we
do something because we want to help the children and can see that what we
are doing is helping them? Or do we do it because it is inexpensive or
convenient for school, teachers, administrators? Or because everyone else
does it? We must beware of making a virtue of necessity, and cooking up
high- sounding educational reasons for doing what is done really for reasons
of administrative economy or convenience. The still greater danger is that,
having started to do something for good enough reasons, we may go on
doing it stubbornly and blindly, as I did that day, unable or unwilling to see
that we are doing more harm than good.

When my colleague Bill Hull first came to the school where we taught
fifth grade together, he worked as an apprentice to the head of the math
department, a much older man who had been teaching math all his life, and
at this exclusive school for high-IQ kids for many years. One day, at the end
of a day's teaching, he summed up his life's work to Bill in these words: "I
teach, but they don't learn."

That's what most teachers know who are honest about their work, and
that's what I soon learned when I began teaching in Colorado. I taught, but
they didn't learn. A few, good students before I ever saw them, stayed good.
The bad students got no better and mostly got worse. If we checked the
records of the "best" schools in this country to see how many of their C and
D students they were able to turn into A students, the number would surely
be pitifully small.

The question I have been trying to answer for many years is: Why don't
they learn what we teach them? The answer I have come to boils down to
this: Because we teach them--that is, try to control the contents of their
minds.

October 30, 1958

 Everyone around here talks as if, except for a few hopeless characters,
these children know most of the math they are supposed to know. It just isn't
so. Out of the twenty kids in the class there are at least six who don't even
know simple "addition facts" and many more who, whether they know the
facts or not, habitually add by counting on their fingers, usually keeping
them well out of sight. There are still more who don't understand and can't
do multiplication and division. I hate to think what we will find about their
understanding of place value.
It would be easy to make up an arithmetic test that without being too long,
or unfairly tricky, or covering anything but what these kids are supposed to
know, would stump all but a few of the children in fifth grade. Or any grade.
The ninth-graders I taught came to me with respectable school records in
arithmetic, yet they knew little about division, less about fractions, and next
to nothing about decimals.

It begins to look as if the test-examination-marks business is a gigantic

racket, the purpose of which is to enable students, teachers, and schools to
take part in a joint pretense that the students know everything they are
supposed to know, when in fact they know only a small part of it--if any at
all. Why do we always announce exams in advance, if not to give Students a
chance to cram for them? Why do teachers, even in graduate schools, always
say quite specifically what the exam will be about, even telling the type of
questions that will be given? Because otherwise too many students would
flunk. What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a proof gave a surprise test
in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen;
that's why they don't do it.

It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of
what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is
remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we
learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily,
serious, non-school parts of our lives.

March 20, 1959

Today Jane did one of those things that, for all her rebellious and annoying
behavior in class, make her one of the best and most appealing people,
young or old, that I have ever known. I was at the board, trying to explain to
her a point on long division, when she said, in self-defense, "But Miss W.
[her fourth-grade teacher] told us that we should take the first number..."
Here she saw the smallest shadow of doubt on my face. She knew instantly
that I did not approve of this rule, and without so much as a pause she
continued, "... it wasn't Miss W., it was someone else..." and then went on
talking about long division.

I was touched and very moved. How many adults would have seen what
she saw, that what she was saying about Miss W.'s teaching was, in some
slight degree, lowering my estimate of Miss W.? Even more to the point,
how many adults, given this opportunity to shift the blame for their
difficulties onto the absent Miss W., would instead have instantly changed
their story to protect her from blame? For all our yammering about loyalty,
not one adult in a thousand would have shown the loyalty that this little girl
gave to her friend and former teacher. And she scarcely had to think to do it;
for her, to defend one's friends from harm, blame, or even criticism was an
instinct as natural as breathing.

Teachers and schools tend to mistake good behavior for good character.
What they prize above all else is docility, suggestibility; the child who will
do what he is told; or even better, the child who will do what is wanted
without even having to be told. They value most in children what children
least value in themselves. Small wonder that their effort; to build character is
such a failure; they don't know it when they see it. Jane is a good example.
She has been a trial to everyone who has taught her. Even this fairly lenient
school finds her barely tolerable; most schools long since would have kicked
her out in disgrace. Of the many adults who have known her, probably very
few have recognized her extraordinary qualities or appreciated their worth.
Asked for an estimate of her character, most of them would probably say
that it was bad. Yet, troublesome as she is, I wish that there were more
children like her.

Someone called courage "the lovely virtue." It is lovely, and nowhere

more so than in little children, who are so weak and vulnerable and have so
many good reasons to be afraid.

With few exceptions, schools and school people do not value courage in
children. Not understanding it, and having very little of it themselves, they
fear it, and do all they can to stamp it out. They think that children who are
brave will be hard to handle, rebellious, defiant, and that children who are
scared will be easy to control. They have it exactly backwards. The defiant,
destructive, violent children who fill our schools, in city and country, are not
brave, and it is because they are not that they will do anything to look good
in the eyes of the peer group, the mob of age-mates whose whims and
prejudices mean all the world to them.

If the schools could only learn to recognize, to value, and to foster courage
in children, a great many of their most serious problems, not just of learning,
but also of discipline, would be well on the road toward a solution. But there
are few signs that this is about to happen.

April 11, 1959

The things children talk about in class, when they are allowed to talk at all,
are seldom close to their hearts. Only once in a great while do I feel, at the
end of a class discussion that I have come close to the real life of these
children. One such discussion was about hiding places; another, just a few
days ago, was about names.

This latter came up in Roman history. The time arrived in Rome when the
mob gained political power, so that the ability to arouse and inflame the mob
was a sure key to high office. The kids wanted to know how this was done. I
said it was done mostly with names. The way to arouse a mob against your
political opponent was to call him names, the kind of names the mob hates
most, or can be talked into hating. The mob spirit is weaker in these children
than it will be in a few years, and they were skeptical; they wanted to know
what kind of names would arouse a mob.

For answer, I asked them, "Well, what kind of names do you hate to be
called?" We were off. Before the end of the period the board was covered
with names. About half were what I expected, the usual ten-year-old insults-
-idiot, stupid, nut head, fat slob, chicken, dope, scared-cat, etc. The rest
surprised me. They were all terms of endearment.

It was quite a scene. There were all these bright-faced, lively children,
eyes dancing with excitement and enthusiasm, seeing who could most
strongly express their collective contempt and disgust for all the names that
adults might suppose they like most. Someone would say, "Dearie-ug-g-g-
g.gh!.. Chorus of agreement. Someone else would say, "Honey-- ic-c-c-c-
ch!" More agreement. Every imaginable term of affection and endearment
came in for its share. Not one was legitimate, not one was accepted. Nobody
said of any term, "Well, that's not too bad." To some extent the children may
have been carried away by the excitement of the game, but from the way
they looked and sounded I felt sure, and do now, that they really meant what
they were saying, that their dislike of these terms of endearment was genuine
and deeply felt.

Why should this be? Of course, ten is a heroic age for most kids. They
remind me in many ways of the Homeric Greeks. They are quarrelsome and
combative; they have a strong and touchy sense of honor; they believe that
every affront must be repaid, and with interest; they are fiercely loyal to
their friends, even though they may change friends often; they have little
sense of fair play, and greatly admire cunning and trickery; they are both
highly possessive and very generous--no smallest trifle may be taken from
them, but they are likely to give any· thing away if they feel so disposed.
Most of the time, they don't feel like little children, and they don't like being
talked to as if they were little children.

But there is more to it than this. They suspect and resent these terms of
endearment because they have too often heard them used by people who did
not mean them. Everyone who deals with children these days has heard the
dictum that children need to be loved, must be loved. But even to those who
like them most, children are not always a joy and delight to be with. Often
they are much like older people, and often they are exasperating and
irritating. It is not surprising that there are many adults who do not like
children much, if at all. But they feel that they ought to like them, have a
duty to like them, and they try to discharge this duty by acting, particularly
by talking, as if they liked them. Hence the continual and meaningless use of
words like - honey, dearie, etc. Hence, the dreadful, syrupy voice that so
many adults use when they speak to children. By the time they are ten,
children are fed up with this fake affection, and ready to believe that, most
of the time, adults believe and mean very little of what they say.

May 3, 1959

The more I see of our troublemaking Jane, and the more I think about her,
the clearer it becomes that she has a great need to feel truly loved, but feels
that being loved when she is nice, good, obedient, etc., does not count.
Loved is a tricky word here; perhaps I should say admired, appreciated, or
even honored and respected. She is like Cyrano; she thinks nothing could be
more contemptible than to try to get approval and affection from others by
saying, doing, and being what they want.
 Isn't there much to admire in this? Perhaps someday she will feel that she
can oblige and help the people she likes without having to worry about
whether she gets anything out of it for herself. Right now, she finds it hard to
show her natural affection, as other children might, just by being
affectionate. On the contrary, she feels she must continually test, by
misbehaving, the affection of others for her. Now and then she miscalculates
and draws down on herself a punishment that she thinks is too severe, and so
falls into a cycle of angry rebellion that she does not know how to break.

She is at my lunch table these days, and is delightful company; she's even
making vague gestures in the direction of better table manners. I wish I
could persuade her that she need not every day give our affection for her the
acid test, but I guess only time will do that. At lunch the other day she said
to me, "I hate teachers!" and then gave me a 1/100-second smile and a hard
sock on the arm. How much easier her life would be if we did not
continually oblige her to choose between our adult approval and her own
self-respect.

After school ended, I did not see Jane until midsummer, when I went with
friends to a beach in the town where she lived. We came round a corner and
there she was, on the opposite side of the street with a couple of her friends.
She came running over and planted herself in front of me. "What are you
doing here?" she said. I said, "Just going to the beach, if that's all right with
you." She looked at me a second or two and then said, "Teachers!" and
something about never being able to get away from them. On that note we
parted. But I was very glad to see her.

That fall, since I was teaching at another school, I didn't see her again until
about November. One day I was walking down a street in Cambridge and
caught sight of her. She saw me and came running toward me. I waited for
her to plant herself in front of me and demand to know again what I was
doing there. But instead of stopping, she kept on running--and to my utter
astonishment, jumped right up into my arms. I was almost overcome with
surprise and joy. She knew! In a moment I put her down on the sidewalk,
and we stood there awhile, looking at each other with pleasure, but without
much to say--how's school, it's okay, how's your new school, it's fine. Then
we said good-bye and went our different ways. When I next saw her, she
was too old for any such displays of feeling even if she still had the feelings.
 Just last summer I saw her again, now a young married woman of thirty-
one. I told her that she had been my favorite in that class. She was surprised.
The adult had long forgotten what, for an instant at least, the ten-year-old
child had known.

June 3, 1959

I've corrected and scored the final math tests. The results are not quite as
dismal as last week; most people did a little better. But one exception
suggests that drill is not always as helpful as most people think. Caroline
took the first test after being out two weeks, during which she missed much
review work. She surprised me by getting 15 out of 25. Today, after taking
the other test a week ago, and after a week of further review, she got only 7
right. It looks as if she learns more when she is out of school than when she
is in it.

This surprised me then; it doesn't surprise me now. Most children learn

more, even more schoolwork, when they are out of school than when they
are in. As I pointed out in Teach Your Own, when children who normally go
to school get sick or hurt and can't go, the schools send tutors to their homes
so that they won't fall behind in their schoolwork. In most places these tutors
see the children from two to three hours a week, in some places less than
that. It is enough; the children keep up with their classmates and even go
ahead, for now they have time to read all they want, and their reading and
other work is not endlessly interrupted by the time-wasting routines of
school.

Looking at the low gang, I feel angry and disgusted with myself for having
given these tests. The good students didn't need them; the poor students,
during this month or more of preparation and review, had most of whatever
confidence and common sense they had picked up during the year knocked
right out of them. Looking at Monica today, on the edge of tears, unable to
bring herself even to try most of the problems, I felt that I had literally done
her an injury.

There was a lot of room for improvement in the rather loose classes I was
running last fall, but the children were doing some real thinking and
learning, and were gaining confidence in their own powers. From a blind
producer Ben was on his way to being a very solid and imaginative thinker;
now he has fallen back into recipe-following production strategy of the
worst kind. What is this test nonsense, anyway? Do people go through life
taking math tests, with other people telling them to hurry? Are we trying to
turn out intelligent people, or test takers?

The answer to that question was not hard to find. What the schools wanted
was good test takers. Nothing else was anywhere near as important.

I remember an old chief machinist on an obsolete training submarine in

Key West saying bitterly about his worn-out engines, which he had spent
many hours polishing up for an official inspection, "They shine, don't they?
Who the hell cares if they don't work?"

There must be a way to educate young children so that the great human
qualities that we know are in them may be developed. But we'll never do it
as long as we are obsessed with tests. At faculty meetings we talk about how
to reward the thinkers in our classes. Who is kidding whom? No amount of
rewards and satisfactions obtained in the small group thinking sessions will
make up to Monica for what she felt today, faced by a final test that she
knew she couldn't do and was going to fail. Pleasant experiences don't make
up for painful ones. No child, once painfully burned, would agree to be
burned again, however enticing the reward. For all our talk and good
intentions, there is much more stick than carrot in school, and while this
remains so, children are going to adopt a strategy aimed above all else at
staying out of trouble. How can we foster a joyous, alert, wholehearted
participation in life if we build all our schooling around the holiness of
getting "right answers"?

March 8, 1960

The other day a woman said for me, better than I ever could have said it
for myself, just what is wrong with the whole school setup. During this past
vacation I visited a school that was still in session. It has the reputation of
being very "good" and "tough." The headmistress, who was very nice, asked
me where I had taught. When I told her, she said with false humility, "I'm
afraid you'll find us very old- fashioned." But she made me welcome, and
particularly urged me to visit the arithmetic class of her fourth-grade teacher,
who had been there for many years and was generally felt to be a jewel
among teachers and the pride of the school. I went. Soon after I arrived the
class began. The children had done some multiplication problems and, in
turn, were reading answers from their marked papers. All went smoothly
until, right after a child had read his answer, another child raised his hand.
"What is it, Jimmy?" the teacher asked, with just the faintest hint in her
voice that this interruption could not be really necessary. "Well, I didn't get
that answer," said Jimmy, "I got..." but before he could say more, the teacher
said, "Now, Jimmy, I'm sure we don't want to hear any wrong answers." And
that was the last word out of Jimmy.

This woman is far ahead of most teachers in intelligence, education, and

experience. She is articulate, cultivated, has had a good schooling, and is
married to a college professor. And in the twenty years or more that she has
been teaching it has apparently never occurred to her that it might be worth
taking a moment now and then to hear these unsuccessful Jimmies talk about
their wrong answers, on the chance that from their talk she might learn
something about their thinking and what was making the answers come out
wrong. What makes everyone call her such a good teacher? I suppose it is
the ability to manage children effortlessly, which she does. And for all I
know, even the Jimmies may think she is a good teacher; it would never
occur to them that it was this nice lady's fault that they couldn't understand
arithmetic; no, it must be their own fault, for being so stupid.

It took me many painful years to learn just how typical this teacher was.

For that matter, if we took the trouble to look into them, we might find that
many "wrong answers" were not wrong at all, but perfectly sensible. A
young teacher in Vermont wrote me not Long ago that one of the problems
in her math textbook said that it took 1 ½ cans of paint to paint the window
trim in a house, and asked how many half cans that was. When one of her
students gave the answer "one," she asked him how he got it. He said,
"There's one full can, and there's one half can." Nothing wrong with that;
indeed, it's what we would have seen in the real-life situation. But too many
teachers, and of course all machine-scored tests, would simply have marked
this answer wrong.

April 7, 1960

Here are first-graders, learning to read by the supposedly well-worked-out

and highly regarded Gillingham method. The method requires that they be
able to say which letters are vowels and which are consonants. Instead of
telling them sensibly that we call a few letters vowels and the others
consonants, the method tries to have them learn the difference by definition
always a bad way, even when the definition is good. So the teacher tells
them, "A consonant is a cut-off sound, made without using the vocal cords."
They will be required to learn this definition, repeat it from memory, and
give examples of it. They look confused, but their confusions have just
begun, because this definition, though true of many consonants, is not true of
many others, like z, the g of George, I, r, m, n, and v; and is only half true of
still others, like s,f; sh, ch, etc. Eventually the children will learn that some
letters are called vowels because that is what we decided to call them, but
this false definition of consonant is going to give them much trouble in the
meantime.

Why do we tell children things that about one minute's thought would tell
us are not true? Partly because we ourselves do not need the definition to
know what a vowel is, and hence are not troubled by its inconsistency. I
know a dog, or a vowel, when I see one, so I don't care how you define
them. Also, like many children, we are apt to follow rules blindly, without
thinking about them or checking them against fact. But the main reason we
are careless about what we say to children is that we think it doesn't make
any difference. We underestimate their intellectual ability, the extent to
which (at least at first) they think about what they hear, try to make sense
out of it, and are baffled, upset, and frightened when they cannot.

Children so taught do very odd things. One boy, quite a good student, was
working on the problem "If you have six jugs, and you want to put two
thirds of a pint of lemonade into each jug, how much lemonade will you
need?" His answer was 18 pints. I said, "How much in each jug?" "Two
thirds of a pint." I said, "Is that more or less than a pint?" "Less." I said,
"How many jugs are there?" "Six." I said, "But that doesn't make any
sense." He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, that's the way the system
worked out." Precisely. He has long since quit expecting school to make
sense. They tell you these facts and rules, and your job is to put them down
on paper the way they tell you. Never mind whether they mean anything or
not.

That reminds me. In a number of first-grade classes I have seen tacked up

on the wall a notice saying, "When two vowels go out walking, the first one
does the talking." Very nice. A little further inspection shows that in that
sentence there are two pairs of vowels, both of which violate the rule. Now
what are children expected to make of this?
 In recent years many teachers have told me that this "rule" is still put up on
the walls of many first grades.

I told some friends about the lemonade boy, to show why I objected to so
much of our teaching. They felt he must be unusual, that most children find
school sensible and connected with life. Not ten minutes later, in the
backyard, I had this conversation with their daughter, then in second grade.

"How's school these days?"

"Okay."

"What sort of stuff do they teach you?" (I hardly ever ask this question
anymore.)

Pause. "Oh, stuff like the difference between 'gone' and 'went.' "

"I see. By the way, can you tell me which is right, 'I have gone to the
movies' or 'I have went to the movies.' "

Long thoughtful pause. Then, "I don't know; I can't tell when it isn't
written on the board."

We both laughed at this.

Later, swearing them to secrecy (I knew I could trust them), I told the
child's parents this story. They said ruefully that they began to see what I
meant.

Second-graders, who had supposedly been taught "phonics" by the

Gillingham method, were asked by their teacher, "What letter does Potomac
begin with?" There was a chorus of guesses--P, T, V, and many others--with
the children all trying to get clues from each other and the teacher. A few
children really knew, and their conviction, as well as their reputation for
usually being right in such matters, won over the others, so that after a while
they were all saying P. And the teacher looked pleased and satisfied! Later,
pointing to a map on the wall, she asked, "Which way would you go if you
flew east?" Arms waved in all directions, again settling down as everyone
got his cue from the successful student and the teacher's encouraging
expressions.
 Later, in music class, the children were asked to touch their toes when the
teacher played a C. The teacher then played a little march, to which the
children walked around. Every time she came to a C, she held it. Naturally,
the children touched their toes each time. Just as naturally, they touched
them if any note other than C was held, and when C was played without
being held, they ignored it. And this woman thought she was teaching them
C! And she has been doing this now for ten or maybe twenty years-and in
one of our "best" schools.

This is typical of schools' thinking in another respect. Teachers, not

understanding that children like to learn things, believing that learning is
painful (because it is for them), every so often try to make it "fun" by taking
some tiny task, in this case recognizing the sound of the C, and making it the
center of some elaborate game. Teachers' magazines are full of such
suggestions. These games take an enormous amount of time to organize and
carry out--and so fill up the school day, bring the class just that much closer
to that distant and longed-for closing bell. But they also complicate and
confuse the learning situation. In electronics terms, they bury the signal
(whatever the teacher is trying to get across) in a lot of noise. For the
children in this particular class, what was the point of this activity? To
march around the room? To touch your toes? To listen to the music? How
could they apply their minds to a task when they hardly knew what it was?

Children in the right-wrong situation will naturally grasp at every available

clue. We teachers have to learn to present problems so that irrelevant clues
will not lead so often to correct performance. We must learn to know when
our faces and minds are being read, and to mix our signals accordingly. Even
more important, we must make children more aware of their own strategies,
the ways in which they try to get us to do their thinking for them. I often say
to kids, supposedly working on a problem, "Why are you staring at me? The
answer isn't going to appear on my forehead." Made aware of what they
were doing, they usually laughed. It would be better yet, I suppose, to turn
away so that they couldn't see my face at all.

When a child gets right answers by illegitimate means, and gets credit for
knowing what he doesn't know, and knows he doesn't know, it does double
harm. First he doesn't learn, his confusions are not cleared up; secondly, he
comes to believe that a combination of bluffing, guessing, mind reading,
snatching at clues, and getting answers from other people is what he is
supposed to do at school; that this is what school is all about; that nothing
else is possible.

April 22, 1960

Trudy had to add 20 + 7. She counted it out on her fingers. I thought,

"What now?" I keep thinking I have plumbed the bottom of these children's
ignorance, and I am always wrong. On a fresh sheet of paper I wrote 10 + 3
= . She counted on her fingers and got 13. I wrote it down. Right under this
problem I wrote 10 + 9 = . When she got 19, I wrote it down. In turn, I
gave her 10 + 4, 10 + 5, 10 + 3, 10 + 6, 10 + 2. Each time she counted on her
fingers to get the answer. Then I gave her 10 + 6 a second time. She counted
on her fingers, said 16, and then looked at the paper for a bit. Then she said,
"Mr. Holt, there's always a 1 and then the same number you added." A
discovery! I was very pleased and said, "Let's see, and yes, you're right." I
then gave her more of the same problems, and also 20 + 5, 20 + 9, 20 + 6, 40
+ 3, and so on. She did all of them without counting on her fingers.

After I got over feeling pleased with myself and her, I had second
thoughts. Had she really learned anything that she could or would use in
other contexts? Did she think it was reasonable that numerals should act this
way? Or was it just another mysterious coincidence? Did it make sense, or
was it just another recipe, one more thing to remember, one more thing that
would trip her up if she forgot it? If she felt that way, she would probably go
back to finger counting, which she feels is at least reliable. And go back she
did, in less than a week.

I suppose this child has been told a thousand times, maybe two thousand,
that when you add a number to 10 you get your answer by writing a 1 and
then the number you added, yet when she discovered it the other day it was
as if she had never seen it before. What on earth would be the use of my
telling her again? When you show a child ten times over how to do
something, and he still can't do it, you might as well stop. You're not making
any connection with whatever is inside his head. You must go at the matter
another way.

One day I asked Trudy to write out her 7 tables. She counted on her fingers
to get each answer-- even for 7 X 2. She has been told umpteen times that 7
X 2 = 14, and has written it many times. Perhaps she even knows it, in the
sense that if I said to her, "What is 7 X 2?" she could answer, "14." But it is
not a piece of knowledge that she dares rely on in a pinch--safer to use those
fingers. Counting, she got up to 6 X 7 = 42 without a slip. Then she made
the kind of mistake that children tend to make when they are bored. She
wrote 8 X 7 = 49. Naturally, there was no self-checker to say, "Whoa, wait a
minute, that doesn't look right." Then she wrote 9 X 7 = 56; but she made
the 6 rather badly, so that it looked like a zero, which is how she read it. This
gave her 10 X 7 = 57, 11 X 7 = 6A, 12 X 7 = 71. And there was not a flicker
of doubt or hesitation as she wrote down these absurdities. She was counting
on her fingers, and carefully, wasn't she? So how could she make a mistake?

I took the paper away and asked her to write the 7 table again. This time I
got 7, 14, 21, 28, 36, 43, 50, 57, 64, 71, 78, and 85.

I took this paper away and asked her to do it again. This time, after a slip
that I pointed out and she corrected, she gave me a correct set of answers.

Then I had what seemed at the time like a bright idea. I thought if I could
get her to think about what she had written, she would see that some of her
answers were more reasonable than others, and thus the beginnings of an
error-noticing, nonsense-eliminating device might take root in her mind. I
gave her all three papers, and asked her, since they did not agree, to compare
her answers, check with a
those she felt sure were right, with an X those
she felt sure were wrong, and with a ? those she wasn't sure of one way or
the other.

A moment later I got one of the most unpleasant surprises of my teaching

career. She handed me her correct paper, with 7 X 1 marked right, and all
other answers marked wrong.

This poor child has been defeated and destroyed by school. Years of drill,
practice, explanation, and testing--the whole process we call education--have
done nothing for her except help to knock her loose from what common
sense she might have had to start with. What else has she to show for five
years worth of struggling and suffering over arithmetic? What kind of an
adult is she going to grow up to be? How is she ever going to be able to
make any sense of the world she will have to live in? What kind of fortresses
of delusion and false security is she going to build for herself in her mind?
It is hard not to feel that in every way it would have been much better for
her never to have had to study arithmetic at all. All it has done for her is
make school a place of pain and danger, where she is so busy thinking about
escape and safety that she can learn almost nothing, and use nothing of what
she learns.

Twenty-one years later, it makes me sad and angry to think how little the
schools and the general public have learned from stories like this, which
could be multiplied by the thousands, or millions, in the classrooms of this
country. This child was indeed defeated and destroyed by school. Perhaps
not by school alone, perhaps not even by school first. But whatever bad may
have happened to her outside of school, school had made a lot worse.

Suppose I had said to her, "Take all the time you want, and do anything
you want--all I want is that at the end you can tell me what seven times two
is and feel absolutely sure that you are right." Could she have done it?
Almost certainly she could not. She didn't have enough trust in numbers, or
in the physical world in general, or in herself, or in schools--or for that
matter, in me. How could she be sure that, when she had really put herself
on the line and said that she was absolutely certain that 7 x 2 = 14, I wouldn't
come up with some tricky question that would once again prove her wrong
and make a fool of her. One thing she had learned in school, and learned
well: as Winston Churchill once said, the purpose of teachers' questions is
not to find out what you know but to find out--and show to everyone around
you--what you don't know. Teachers' questions, like their tests, are traps.
She had been caught by and fallen into a thousand of these clever traps, and
she wasn't going to get caught anymore, not even by me. I might be a little
nicer than most of her teachers, might not shout at her when she is wrong,
but still, I am a teacher like all the others.

If she had simply been allowed to live and grow in her own way, the
chances are good that in a world full of numbers she would have learned
more about numbers than she ever learned in school. And even if by the age
of ten she had learned nothing whatever about them, which is most unlikely,
she would still have been far better off. At least her mind would not have
been full of junk--untrue "facts," meaningless and garbled rules, misery, and
confusion. At least she would have had a chance of making some sense of
numbers if and when she ever had a use for them.

April 27, 1960

We teachers, from primary school through graduate school, all seem to be

hard at work at the business of making it look as if our students know more
than they really do. Our standing among other teachers, or of our school
among other schools, depends on how much our students seem to know; not
on how much they really know, or how effectively they can use what they
know, or even whether they can use it at all. The more material we can
appear to "cover" in our course, or syllabus, or curriculum, the better we
look; and the more easily we can show that when they left our class our
students knew what they were "supposed" to know, the more easily can we
escape blame if and when it later appears (and it usually does) that much of
that material they do not know at all.

When I was in my last year at school, we seniors stayed around an extra

week to cram for college boards. Our ancient-history teacher told us, on the
basis of long experience, that we would do well to prepare ourselves to write
for twenty minutes on each of a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. We
studied his list. We knew the wisdom of taking that kind of advice; if we had
not, we would not have been at that school. When the boards came, we
found that his list comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we
were asked. So we got credit for knowing a great deal about ancient history,
which we did not, he got credit for being a good teacher, which he was not,
and the school got credit for being, as it was, a good place to go if you
wanted to be sure of getting into a prestige college. The fact was that I knew
very little about ancient history; that much of what I thought I knew was
misleading or false; that then, and for many years afterwards, I disliked
history and thought it pointless and a waste of time; and that two months
later I could not have come close to passing the history college boards, or
even a much easier test, but who cared?

I have played the game myself. When I began teaching I thought, naively,
that the purpose of a test was to test, to find out what the students knew
about the course. It didn't take me long to find out that if I gave my students
surprise tests, covering the whole material of the course to date, almost
everyone flunked. This made me look bad, and posed problems for the
school. I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent
or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some
detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice
in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later
learned that teachers do this everywhere. We know that what we are doing is
not really honest, but we dare not be the first to stop, and we try to justify or
excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, it does no particular harm. But we
are wrong; it does great harm.
 It does harm, first of all, because it is dishonest and the students know it.
My friends and I, breezing through the ancient-history boards, knew very
well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on
whom. Our success on the boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient
history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor, which was
great. Even children much younger than we were learn that what most
teachers' want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the
appearance of them. The smart and able ones, at least, come to look on
school as something of a racket, which it is their job to learn how to beat.
And learn they do; they become experts at smelling out the unspoken and
often unconscious preferences and prejudices of their teachers, and at taking
full advantage of them. My first English teacher at prep school gave us
Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive to read, and from his pleasure in reading it
aloud I saw that he was a sucker for the periodic sentence, a long complex
sentence with the main verb at the end. Thereafter I took care to construct at
least one such sentence in every paper I wrote for him, and thus assured
myself a good mark in the course.

Not only does the examination racket do harm by making students feel that
a search for honest understanding is beside the point; it does further harm by
discouraging those few students who go on making that search in spite of
everything. The student who will not be satisfied merely to know "right
answers" or recipes for getting them will not have an easy time in school,
particularly since facts and recipes may be all that his teachers know. They
tend to be impatient or even angry with the student who wants to know, not
just what happened, but why it happened as it did and not some other way.
They rarely have the knowledge to answer such questions, and even more
rarely have the time; there is all that material to cover.

In short, our "Tell-'em-and-test-'em" way of teaching leaves most students

increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky
foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow
meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless
questions.

July 10, 1960

Two arguments are put forward in favor of tests. One is that the threat of
the test makes children work harder, and therefore better. The other is that
the test tells the teacher how much the children have actually learned. Both
arguments are false. To the extent that children really feel threatened by
tests, they work worse, not better. And tests do not show what children have
learned. Not only do they fail to show how much many able children do
know, but they fail to do what one might have expected them to do - expose
the child who knows nothing at all.

One day I was working with Trudy and Eleanor, who is, if anything, even
a poorer student with even less of an idea about how numbers work. On the
board I wrote:

I then did the problem, step by step, slowly, doing every step aloud, and
giving them plenty of time to think about what I was doing, until I got the
answer 583, which I wrote. Then, beside the old problem, I wrote a new one,
so that we had on the board

I said, "We're going to add something to 256 again, but this time, instead
of adding 327, we are going to add 328. This time, you do it." Would they
see that the answer had to be 1 larger than the first answer, or 584? No; after
working together on the problem for a while, on paper, they said tentatively,
"353?"

I then wrote a new problem, and did it aloud, step-by-step, until they were
satisfied it was correct. Then right beside it I wrote exactly the same
problem, so that we had on the board

I asked them to do the second problem. They did not see that it was the
same, and bent once more over the paper. After much writing they said,
"524."
 I did this again, using the problem 88 + 94 = 182; but this time they saw,
though only after some time, that it was the same problem and must have the
same answer.

A short time later I wrote 2 X 12 = 24; 2 X 13 =

Eleanor promptly said, "I can't read it that way," but after I had written it
the way she was used to, went to work and in time gave me the correct
answer, 26. Trudy gave me 68. She read the thoughts on my face and said
hastily, "Wait a minute." After a while she wrote 36. I said, "How did you
get it?" She went to the board, and wrote 2 X 12 = 24, 3 X 12 = .She did
not even notice that she had changed the problem. Then she said, "Well,
there'd be one more." Then she wrote 2 + 1 = 3, 4 + 1 = 5, and then the
answer 35, saying "Is that right?"

Not long afterward Eleanor told me that 20 + 10 = 29.

These children, like almost all children in elementary school, take once or
twice every year a series of tests misnamed achievement tests. There are
several varieties of these, all very much alike and equally worthless. In
theory they enable teachers and schools to measure the "achievement" (what
a word to describe what children spend most of their time doing in school!)
of their pupils against that of pupils of similar age all over the country. In
fact they encourage a kind of cheating; teachers are not supposed to cram
children for these tests, but most of them do, particularly in schools that
make a fetish of high-test scores--which they call "high standards."

The tests are designed so that a child's score comes out as a grade
equivalent. The average fifth- grader should score about 5.5 on most of his
tests, and such a score would show that a child was about equal in
achievement to an average fifth-grader. The confused and hopeless children
that I have worked with naturally never test as well as their abler classmates;
but they are never much more than a year or two behind. This year,
according to the tests, my worst pupils had the mathematical knowledge and
skill of an average child entering the fourth grade. In short, they presumably
knew addition, subtraction, place value, multiplication, and easy division.
But this is utter nonsense. These children know nothing about arithmetic; in
any real sense they don't know what first-graders are supposed to know. An
accurate test, if there could be such a thing, a measuring instrument that
really measured something, would give them a score of one point something.
 No. Much closer to the truth to say that an accurate test, if there had been
such a thing, would have given them a minus score. After five years of
school--in one of the "best" schools-they were much worse off, in terms of
arithmetic (and not just arithmetic), than if they had never been in school at
all.

How are these high scores achieved? A week or two before the tests, their
teachers begin an intensive drilling on all the kinds of problems they will
have to do on the test. By the time the test comes along the children are
conditioned, like Pavlov's dog; when they see a certain arrangement of
numerals and symbols before them, lights begin to flash, wheels begin to
turn, and like robots they go through the answer-getting process, or enough
of them to get a halfway decent score. Teachers are not supposed to do this;
but they all do. So did I. The school asked me to, rather apologetically,
knowing my feelings in such matters, but firmly nonetheless; when children
pull down bad test scores there is an instant uproar from the parents. And it
makes it hard for the kids when the time comes for them to enter their next
schools. Schools being what they are, these poor devils are going to have
trouble enough as it is; why make it harder for them by making their
abysmal ignorance a matter of public record? So I go along with the
practice. But is this a sensible way to carry out the education of our
children?

December 4, 1960

Some time ago, in an article on race stereotypes, I read something that

stuck in my mind but that only recently has seemed to have anything to do
with children.

The author spent some time in a German concentration camp during the
war. He and his fellow prisoners, trying to save both their lives and
something of their human dignity, and to resist, despite their impotence, the
demands of their jailers, evolved a kind of camp personality as a way of
dealing with them. They adopted an air of amiable dull wittedness, of
smiling foolishness, of cooperative and willing incompetence--like the good
soldier Schweik. Told to do something, they listened attentively, nodded
their heads eagerly, and asked questions that showed they had not
understood a word of what had been said. When they could not safely do this
any longer, they did as far as possible the opposite of what they had been
told to do, or did it, but as badly as they dared. They realized that this did not
much impede the German war effort, or even the administration of the camp;
but it gave them a way of preserving a small part of their integrity in a
hopeless situation.

After the war the author did a good deal of work, in many parts of the
world, with subject peoples; but not for some time did he recognize, in the
personality of the "good black boy" of many African colonies, or the "good
nigger" of the American South, the camp personality adopted during the war
by himself and his fellow prisoners. When he first saw the resemblance, he
was startled. Did these people, as he had done, put on this personality
deliberately? He became convinced that this was true. Subject peoples both
appease their rulers and satisfy some part of their desire for human dignity
by putting on a mask, by acting more stupid and incompetent than they
really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability,
by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies.

Does not something very close to this happen often in school? Children are
subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail. Do they not, to some
extent, escape and frustrate the relentless, insatiable pressure of their elders
by withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from
the scene? Is this not at least a partial explanation of the extraordinary
stupidity that otherwise bright children so often show in school? The
stubborn and dogged "I don't get it" with which they meet the instructions
and explanations of their teachers--may it not be a statement of resistance as
well as one of panic and flight?

I think this is almost certainly so. Whether children do this consciously

and deliberately depends on the age and character of the child. Under
pressure that they want to resist but don't dare to resist openly, some children
may quite deliberately go stupid; I have seen it and felt it. Most of them,
however, are probably not this aware of what they are doing. They deny
their intelligence to their jailers, the teachers, not so much to frustrate them
but because they have other and more important uses for it. Freedom to live
and to think about life for its own sake is important and even essential to a
child. He will give only so much time and thought to what others want him
to do; the rest he demands and takes for his own interests, plans, worries,
and dreams. The result is that he is not all there during most of his hours in
school. Whether he is afraid to be there, are or just does not want to be there,
the result is the same. Fear, boredom, and resistance--they all go to make
what we call stupid children.

To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.

A dismal thought, but hard to escape. Infants are not stupid. Children of one,
two, or even three throw the whole of themselves into everything they do.
They embrace life, and devour it; it is why they learn so fast and are such
good company. Listlessness, boredom, and apathy--these all come later.
Children come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is
dead, or at least silent. Open a first or third grade to questions, and you will
be deluged; fifth-graders say nothing. They either have no questions or will
not ask them. They think, "What's this leading up to? What's the catch?"
Last year, thinking that self- consciousness and embarrassment might be
silencing the children, I put a question box in the classroom, and said that I
would answer any questions they put into it. In four months I got one
question--"How long does a bear live?" While I was talking about the life
span of bears and other creatures, one child said impatiently, "Come on, get
to the point." The expressions on the children's faces seemed to say, "You've
got us here in school; now make us do whatever it is that you want us to do."
Curiosity, questions, and speculation--these are for out- side school, not
inside.

Boredom and resistance may cause as much stupidity in school as fear.

Give a child the kind of task he gets in school, and whether he is afraid of it,
or resists it, or is willing to do it but bored by it, he will do the task with only
a small part of his attention, energy, and intelligence. In a word, he will do it
stupidly--even if correctly. This soon becomes a habit. He gets used to
working at low power, he develops strategies to enable him to get by this
way. In time he even starts to think of himself as being stupid, which is what
most fifth-graders think of themselves, and to think that his low-power way
of coping with school is the only possible way.

It does no good to tell such students to pay attention and think about what
they are doing. I can see myself now, in one of my ninth-grade algebra
classes in Colorado, looking at one of my flunking students, a boy who had
become frozen in his school stupidity, and saying to him in a loud voice,
"Think! Think! Think!" Wasted breath; he had forgotten how. The stupid
way--timid, unimaginative, defensive, evasive-in which he met and dealt
with the problems of algebra were, by that time, the only way he knew of
dealing with them. His strategies and expectations were fixed; he couldn't
even imagine any others. He really was doing his dreadful best.

We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do
even for an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn't
interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any. Not I,
certainly. Yet children have far less awareness of and control of their
attention than we do. No use to shout at them to pay attention. If we want to
get tough enough about it, as many schools do, we can terrorize a class of
children into sitting still with their hands folded and their eyes glued on us,
or somebody; but their minds will be far away. The attention of children
must be lured, caught, and held, like a shy wild animal that must be coaxed
with bait to come close. If the situations, the materials, the problems before a
child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him,
and no amount of exhortation or threats will bring it back.

A child is most intelligent when the reality before him arouses in him a
high degree of attention, interest, concentration, involvement--in short, when
he cares most about what he is doing. This is why we should make
schoolrooms and schoolwork as interesting and exciting as possible, not just
so that school will be a pleasant place, but so that children in school will act
intelligently and get into the habit of acting intelligently. The case against
boredom in school is the same as the case against fear; it makes children
behave stupidly, some on purpose, most because they cannot help it. If this
goes on long enough, as it does in school, they forget what it is like to grasp
at something, as they once grasped at everything, with all their minds and
senses; they forget how to deal positively and aggressively with life and
experience, to think and say, "I see it! I get it! I can do it!"

April 9, 1961

The section Real Learning described some of the non-symbolic work that
Marjorie did with Cuisenaire rods. But words cannot describe the freedom,
the happiness, the lack of tension, the alertness, the concentration, and the
intellectual power that she showed doing this work. She was like someone I
had never seen before. For most of her years in school she has been cheating
or bluffing, using illegitimate tactics to pry right answers out of other
people, and pretending to know and understand what she did not. Now she
was free of the need for all this.
 When I hear in my mind her voice saying, "It's such fun when you get the
trick," it makes me sad, and angry, and appalled, that in our well-meaning
way we have given this child, and many others, so few opportunities for real
thought and discovery, honest understanding. We have done to their
intelligence what denying them good food would have done to their bodies.
We have made them intellectually weak and stunted, and worse, dishonest.
No doubt children are clever about fooling their teachers about what they
know; but the job is made much easier by the fact that we, their teachers, are
so ready, so eager to be fooled, to tell ourselves that children know what a
few minutes' careful inspection would show they did not know at all.

June 15, 1961

A mother said to me not long ago, "I think you are making a mistake in
trying to make schoolwork so interesting for the children. After all, they are
going to have to spend most of their lives doing things they don't like, and
they might as well get used to it now.

Every so often the curtain of slogans and platitudes behind which most
people live opens up for a second, and you get a glimpse of what they really
think. This is not the first time a parent has said this to me, but it horrifies
me as much as ever. What an extraordinary view of life, from one of the
favored citizens of this most favored of all nations! Is life nothing but
drudgery, an endless list of dreary duties? Is education nothing but the
process of getting children ready to do them? It was as if she had said, "My
boy is going to have to spend his life as a slave, so I want you to get him
used to the idea, and see to it that when he gets to be a slave, he will be a
dutiful and diligent and well-paid one."

It's easy to see how an adult, in a discouraged moment, hemmed in by

seemingly pointless and petty duties and responsibilities, might think of life
as a kind of slavery. But one would expect that people feeling this way about
their own lives would want something better for their children, would say, in
effect, "I have somehow missed the chance to put much joy and meaning
into my own life; please educate my children so that they will do better."

Well, that's our business, whether parents say it or not.

This woman is attractive, intelligent, fond of her son, and interested in

him. Yet she shares with many parents and teachers a belief about her child
and children in general, which is both profoundly disrespectful and untrue. It
is that they never do anything and never will do anything "worthwhile"
unless some adult makes them do it. All this woman's stories about herself
and her boy have the same plot: at first, he doesn't want to do something;
then, she makes him do it; finally, he does it well, and maybe even enjoys it.
She never tells me stories about things that her boy does well without being
made to, and she seems uninterested and even irritated when I tell her such
stories. The only triumphs of his that she savors are those for which she can
give herself most of the credit.

Children sense this attitude. They resent it, and they are right to resent it.
By what right do we assume that there is nothing good in children except
what we put there? This view is condescending and presumptuous. More
important, it is untrue, and blinds us to the fact that in our clumsy and
ignorant efforts to mold the character of children we probably destroy at
least as many good qualities as we develop, do at least as much harm as
good.

No - we do far more harm than good.

TO SUMMARIZE

When we talk about intelligence, we do not mean the ability to get a good
score on a certain kind of test, or even the ability to do well in school; these
are at best only indicators of something larger, deeper, and far more
important. By intelligence we mean a style of life, a way of behaving in
various situations, and particularly in new, strange, and perplexing
situations. The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do,
but how we behave when we don't know what to do.

The intelligent person, young or old, meeting a new situation or problem,

opens himself up to it; he tries to take in with mind and senses everything he
can about it; he thinks about it, instead of about himself or what it might
cause to happen to him; he grapples with it boldly, imaginatively,
resourcefully, and if not confidently at least hopefully; if he fails to master it,
he looks without shame or fear at his mistakes and learns from them. This is
intelligence. Clearly its roots lie in a certain feeling about life, and one's self
with respect to life. Just as clearly, unintelligence is not what most
psychologists seem to suppose, the same thing as intelligence only less of it.
It is an entirely different style of behavior, arising out of an entirely different
set of attitudes.

Years of watching and comparing bright children and the not bright, or
less bright, have shown that they are very different kinds of people. The
bright child is curious about life and reality, eager to get in touch with it,
embrace it, unite himself with it. There is no wall, no barrier between him
and life. The dull child is far less curious, far less interested in what goes on
and what is real, more inclined to live in worlds of fantasy. The bright child
likes to experiment, to try things out. He lives by the maxim that there is
more than one way to skin a cat. If he can't do something one-way, he'll try
another. The dull child is usually afraid to try at all. It takes a good deal of
urging to get him to try even once; if that try fails, he is through.

The bright child is patient. He can tolerate uncertainty and failure, and will
keep trying until he gets an answer. When all his experiments fail, he can
even admit to himself and others that for the time being he is not going to
get an answer. This may annoy him, but he can wait. Very often, he does not
want to be told how to do the problem or solve the puzzle he has struggled
with, because he does not want to be cheated out of the chance to figure it
out for himself in the future. Not so the dull child. He cannot stand
uncertainty or failure. To him, an unanswered question is not a challenge or
an opportunity but a threat. If he can't find the answer quickly, it must be
given to him, and quickly; and he must have answers for everything. Such
are the children of whom a second-grade teacher once said, "But my
children like to have questions for which there is only one answer." They
did; and by a mysterious coincidence, so did she.

The bright child is willing to go ahead on the basis of incomplete

understanding and information. He will take risks, sail uncharted seas,
explore when the landscape is dim, the landmarks few, the light poor. To
give only one example, he will often read books he does not understand in
the hope that after a while enough understanding will emerge to make it
worthwhile to go on. In this spirit some of my fifth- graders tried to read
Moby-Dick. But the dull child will go ahead only when he thinks he knows
exactly where he stands and exactly what is ahead of him. If he does not feel
he knows exactly what an experience will be like, and if it will not be
exactly like other experiences he already knows, he wants no part of it. For
while the bright child feels that the universe is, on the whole, a sensible,
reasonable, and trustworthy place, the dull child feels that it is senseless,
unpredictable, and treacherous. He feels that he can never tell what may
happen, particularly in a new situation, except that it will probably be bad.

Nobody starts off stupid. You have only to watch babies and infants, and
think seriously about what all of them learn and do, to see that, except for
the most grossly retarded, they show a style of life, and a desire and ability
to learn, that in an older person we might well call genius. Hardly an adult in
a thousand, or ten thousand, could in any three years of his life learn as
much, grow as much in his understanding of the world around him, as every
infant learns and grows in his first three years. But what happens, as we get
older, to this extraordinary capacity for learning and intellectual growth?

What happens is that it is destroyed, and more than by any other one thing,
by the process that we misname education--a process that goes on in most
homes and schools. We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative
capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We
destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing
what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of
being wrong. Thus we make them afraid to gamble, afraid to experiment,
afraid to try the difficult and the unknown. Even when we do not create
children's fears, when they come to us with fears ready-made and built-in,
we use these fears as handles to manipulate them and get them to do what
we want. Instead of trying to whittle down their fears, we build them up,
often to monstrous size. For we like children who are a little afraid of us,
docile, deferential children, though not, of course, if they are so obviously
afraid that they threaten our image of ourselves as kind, lovable people
whom there is no reason to fear. We find ideal the kind of "good" children
who are just enough afraid of us to do everything we want, without making
us feel that fear of us is what is making them do it.

We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning

in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and
compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards--gold stars, or
papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor
rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys-in short, for the ignoble
satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else. We encourage
them to feel that the end and aim of all they do in school is nothing more
than to get a good mark on a test, or to impress someone with what they
seem to know. We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a
good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of
them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few
who do.

In many ways, we break down children's convictions that things make

sense, or their hope that things may prove to make sense. We do it, first of
all, by breaking up life into arbitrary and disconnected hunks of subject
matter, which we then try to "integrate" by such artificial and irrelevant
devices as having children sing Swiss folk songs while they are studying the
geography of Switzerland, or do arithmetic problems about rail-splitting
while they are studying the boyhood of Lincoln. Furthermore, we
continually confront them with what is senseless, ambiguous, and
contradictory; worse, we do it without knowing that we are doing it, so that,
hearing nonsense shoved at them as if it were sense, they come to feel that
the source of their confusion lies not in the material but in their own
stupidity. Still further, we cut children off from their own common sense and
the world of reality by requiring them to play with and shove around words
and symbols that have little or no meaning to them. Thus we turn the vast
majority of our students into the kind of people for whom all symbols are
meaningless; who cannot use symbols as a way of learning about and
dealing with reality; who cannot understand written instructions; who, even
if they read books, come out knowing no more than when they went in; who
may have a few new words rattling around in their heads, but whose mental
models of the world remain unchanged and, indeed, impervious to change.
The minority, the able and successful students, we are very likely to turn into
something different but just as dangerous: the kind of people who can
manipulate words and symbols fluently while keeping themselves largely
divorced from the reality for which they stand; the kind of people who like
to speak in large generalities but grow silent or indignant if someone asks for
an example of what they are talking about; the kind of people who, in their
discussions of world affairs, coin and use such words as megadeaths and
megacorpses, with scarcely a thought to the blood and suffering these words
imply.

We encourage children to act stupidly, not only by scaring and confusing

them, but also by boring them, by filling up their days with dull, repetitive
tasks that make little or no claim on their attention or demands on their
intelligence. Our hearts leap for joy at the sight of a roomful of children all
slogging away at some imposed task, and we are all the more pleased and
satisfied if someone tells us that the children don't really like what they are
doing. We tell ourselves that this drudgery, this endless busywork, is good
preparation for life, and we fear that without it children would be hard to
"control." But why must this busywork be so dull? Why not give tasks that
are interesting and demanding? Because, in schools where every task must
be completed and every answer must be right, if we give children more
demanding tasks they will be fearful and will instantly insist that we show
them how to do the job. When you have acres of paper to fill up with pencil
marks, you have no time to waste on the luxury of thinking. By such means
children are firmly established in the habit of using only a small part of their
thinking capacity. They feel that school is a place where they must spend
most of their time doing dull tasks in a dull way. Before long they are deeply
settled in a rut of unintelligent behavior from which most of them could not
escape even if they wanted to.

About six or seven years ago I began to stop talking to teachers and would-
be teachers about radical changes in schools. Why keep asking them to do
what was so obviously beyond their power to do? I began instead to talk
about small, inexpensive, and do-able ways in which, without running any
risks of being fired, they could improve their teaching of reading, writing,
mathematics, "the basics," which have interested me from my very first day
as a teacher.
At a teacher's college in Illinois I said that thinking about such apparently
tiny and trivial matters as how better to teach children to read or add or spell
had made my daily work as a teacher enormously challenging and exciting. I
urged them to take this same creative and responsible but also concrete and
practical attitude toward their own work. Give up methods that don't work.
Keep looking for methods that do. I told them how one of my first students
had asked a question about fractions for which I had only been able to find a
good answer after thirteen years. Such questions, searches, and discoveries
were part of the joy of working as a teacher.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I paused for breath and looked at the
faces of the education students before me. They were looking at me intently,
but what was that strange expression on their faces? Were they excited?
Amused? Puzzled? Skeptical? Angry? No, what I saw was none of these.
What then was I seeing? In a flash it came to me. It was fear! Their
questions afterwards confirmed this. They did not want to hear about
questions waiting thirteen years for an answer. They wanted their answers
right now. They wanted to be told what to do, and if it didn't work, they
wanted that problem to be taken over by someone else.
 Soon after, I met for the first time another phenomenon. At a West Coast
teacher's college two young and friendly psychology prof had asked me to
talk to a joint meeting of their classes. We met in a small, crowded
classroom. I sat on the edge of a table in front, and since I would give my
main "education" talk that evening, I talked to these classes about something
quite different and altogether non-controversial--how much food for
psychological thought we can find in everyday life. It was a topic I had not
spoken on before, and I was exploring the subject and enjoying myself as I
talked.

Then I began to notice something. As always, while I talked I looked at my

audience, now at this person, now at that one, just a quick glance at each.
And I became aware that every time my eyes met the eyes of a student, those
eyes dropped. The first two, three, five times, I thought nothing of it. But
soon this began to force its way into my consciousness. As I talked I
thought, "What in the world is going on here?" I began to pay attention, and
soon saw that this phenomenon was consistent; none of the students would
let their eyes meet mine. I could tell that when I looked away, they would
look up again; all faces remained turned toward me. But the only people
with whom I could make eye-to-eye contact were the smiling Profs. For an
instant I thought about suggesting this to the class as a psychological
phenomenon, which they might later want to examine. But, thinking this
might embarrass them, I decided against it.

Since then I have seen this happen often, though only when I meet with
students in fairly small classrooms. Perhaps in larger lecture halls they feel
far enough away from me to feel safe, or the hall itself seems to them safer.

Anyway, by now I am so used to these frightened faces and dropping eyes

that I am surprised on those rare occasions when I don't see them. I often
think, if I could give one piece of advice to these young people with any
hope that they might follow it, I would say, "For heaven's sake, stay out of
the classroom until you have got over some of your fear of the world. Do
something else first. Travel, live in different places, do different kinds of
work, have some interesting experiences, get to know and like yourselves a
little better, get that seated expression off your faces! Or your teaching will
be a disaster."

Certainly if I had gone direct from college into teaching, my teaching

would have been a disaster. Like these young people, at twenty- one I didn't
like or trust myself much, and was on the whole afraid of the world around
me, above all anything new. Fortunately I did not start teaching until I was
thirty. By then I had had three years of experience as a submarine officer,
some in combat; I had worked six years in responsible positions in the world
government movement, in the course of which I had given about six hundred
public lectures; I had lived alone and made myself at home, on very little
money, in a number of European cities; I had ridden a bicycle most of the
way from Paris to Rome; and, in the course of my work for world
government, I had become something like an extra uncle in about fifty
families with young children. I had not lost all of my distrust in myself or
fear of the world, but I had lost enough so that I could see the trials and
failures of the classroom not as threats to my authority or sense of personal
worth but only as interesting problems to think about and try to solve.

But what would be the point of urging these poor frightened young people
to do the same? They need a job and a paycheck, right now. School teaching
is what they have spent their time and money learning how to do. Other than
unskilled labor, what else could they do? How would they find the kind of
interesting, demanding, and rewarding work that I had had the good luck to
find? Perhaps someday-intelligent schools of education may help them find
such work as a part of their training. None I know of are doing it now.

No, there is no place for them to go but the classroom, and terrified or not,
into it they must go. Once there, they will try to deal with their lack of
confidence, their weak and fragile sense of self-worth, and their
overpowering fear in the only way such people know--by waging an endless
psychological war against the children, to make them even more insecure,
anxious, and fearful than they are themselves.

This war begins very early. A mother told me not long ago that on one of
her five-year-old son's first days in kindergarten he began to talk to a friend.
Having never in his short life been told that he couldn't talk to people, he
didn't know this was a crime. Instead of just telling him her rule, the teacher
scolded him loudly in front of the class. Then she made a long red paper
"tongue," which she pinned to his shirt, after which she began to make fun
of him, calling him Long Tongue and inviting the other children to do the
same--an invitation they could hardly refuse. In such ways is the war waged.
Not much will be learned while it goes on. There are few signs of any end to
it.
 School tends to be a dishonest as well as a nervous place. We adults are
not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what
we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or
tell us they ought to think. Pressure groups find it easy to weed out of our
classrooms, texts, and libraries whatever facts, truths, and ideas they happen
to find unpleasant or inconvenient. And we are not even as truthful with
children as we could safely be, as the parents, politicians, and pressure
groups would let us be. Even in the most non-controversial areas our
teaching, the books, and the textbooks we give children present a dishonest
and distorted picture of the world.

The fact is that we do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children. We

are like the managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow,
London, Peking, and Paris, and all the other capitals of the world. We think
it our right and our duty, not to tell the truth, but to say whatever will best
serve our cause--in this case, the cause of making children grow up into the
kind of people we want them to be, thinking whatever we want them to
think. We have only to convince ourselves (and we are very easily
convinced) that a lie will be "better" for the children than the truth, and we
will lie. We don't always need even that excuse; we often lie only for our
own convenience.

Worse yet, we are not honest about ourselves, our own fears, limitations,
weaknesses, prejudices, motives. We present ourselves to children as if we
were gods, all-knowing, all-powerful, always rational, always just, always
right. This is worse than any lie we could tell about ourselves. I have more
than once shocked teachers by telling them that when kids ask me a question
to which I don't know the answer, I say, "I haven't the faintest idea"; or that
when I make a mistake, as I often do, I say, "I goofed again"; or that when I
am trying to do something I am no good at, like paint in watercolors or play
a clarinet or bugle, I do it in front of them so they can see me struggling with
it, and can realize that not all adults are good at everything. If a child asks
me to do something that I don't want to do, I tell him that I won't do it
because I don't want to do it, instead of giving him a list of "good" reasons
sounding as if they had come down from the Supreme Court. Interestingly
enough, this rather open way of dealing with children works quite well. If
you tell a child that you won't do something because you don't want to, he is
very likely to accept that as a fact which he cannot change; if you ask him to
stop doing something because it drives you crazy, there is a good chance
that, without further talk, he will stop, because he knows what that is like.
 We are, above all, dishonest about our feelings, and it is this sense of
dishonesty of feeling that makes the atmosphere of so many schools so
unpleasant. The people who write books that teachers have to read say over
and over again that a teacher must love all the children in a class, all of them
equally. If by this they mean that a teacher must do the best he can for every
child in a class, that he has an equal responsibility for every child's welfare,
an equal concern for his problems, they are right. But when they talk of love
they don't mean this; they mean feelings, affection, the kind of pleasure and
joy that one person can get from the existence and company of another. And
this is not something that can be measured out in little spoonfuls, everyone
getting the same amount.

In a discussion of this in a class of teachers, I once said that I liked some of

the kids in my class much more than others and that, without saying which
ones I liked best, I had told them so. After all, this is something that children
know, whatever we tell them; it is futile to lie about it. Naturally, these
teachers were horrified. "What a terrible thing to say!" one said. "I love all
the children in my class exactly the same." Nonsense; a teacher who says
this is lying, to herself or to others, and probably doesn't like any of the
children very much. Not that there is anything wrong with that; plenty of
adults don't like children, and there is no reason why they should. But the
trouble is they feel they should, which makes them feel guilty, which makes
them feel resentful, which in turn makes them try to work off their guilt with
indulgence and their resentment with subtle cruelties- cruelties of a kind that
can be seen in many classrooms. Above all, it makes them put on the phony,
syrupy, sickening voice and manner, and the fake smiles and forced, bright
laughter that children see so much of in school, and rightly resent and hate.

As we are not honest with them, so we won't let children be honest with
us. To begin with, we require them to take part in the fiction that school is a
wonderful place and that they love every minute of it. They learn early that
not to like school or the teacher is verboten, not to be said, not even to be
thought. I have known a child, otherwise healthy, happy, and wholly
delightful, who at the age of five was being made sick with worry by the fact
that she did not like her kindergarten teacher. Robert Heinemann worked for
a number of years with remedial students whom ordinary schools were
hopelessly unable to deal with. He found that what choked up and froze the
minds of these children was above all else the fact that they could not
express, they could hardly even acknowledge, the fear, shame, rage, and
hatred that school and their teachers had aroused in them. In a situation in
which they were and felt free to express these feelings to themselves and
others, they were able once again to begin learning. Why can't we say to
children what I used to say to fifth-graders who got sore at me, "The law
says you have to go to school; it doesn't say you have to like it, and it doesn't
say you have to like me either." This might make school more bearable for
many children.

Children hear all the time, "Nice people don't say such things." They learn
early in life that for unknown reasons they must not talk about a large part of
what they think and feel, are most interested in, and worried about. It is a
rare child who, anywhere in his growing up, meets even one older person
with whom he can talk openly about what most interests him, concerns him,
and worries him. This is what rich people are buying for their troubled kids
when for 925 per hour [much more now] they send them to psychiatrists.
Here is someone to whom you can speak honestly about whatever is on your
mind, without having to worry about his getting mad at you. But do we have
to wait until a child is snowed under by his fears and troubles to give him
this chance? And do we have to take the time of a highly trained
professional to hear what, earlier in his life, that child might have told
anybody who was willing to listen sympathetically and honestly? The
workers in a project called Street corner Research, in Cambridge, Mass.,
have found that nothing more than the opportunity to talk openly and freely
about themselves and their lives, to people who would listen without
judging, and who were interested in them as human beings rather than as
problems to be solved or disposed of, has totally remade the lives and
personalities of a number of confirmed and seemingly hopeless juvenile
delinquents. Can't we learn something from this? Can't we clear a space for
honesty and openness and self-awareness in the lives of growing children?
Do we have to make them wait until they are in a jam before giving them a
chance to say what they think?

I soon learned that this, though a problem, was not the major problem--and
is not now. Five or so years later, when the supposed liberal, progressive,
permissive revolution in the schools was at its height, Charles Silberman and
a large team of researchers visited hundreds of school systems all over the
country. What they found everywhere was what Silberman in Crisis in the
Classroom called "appalling incivility" toward children on the part of almost
all adults in schools.
 Beyond that, there is a vast amount of outright physical brutality against
children, mostly young. Adah Maurer, editor of The Last?Resort, an anti-
corporal punishment magazine, recently made a nationwide survey of
schools to find out how many children were formally and officially beaten
each year. If the schools that did not reply beat children as much as those
who did--and the chances are they beat them more--there were about one
and a half million of these beatings in a school year. But these beatings,
which the schools call "paddling" though many of them are brutal enough to
send their small victims to the hospital, are only the official beatings, done in
the principal's office and recorded in a book. How much more unofficial
violence may be done to children--slaps, cuffs, pulling of hair, twisting of
arms and ears, pinching of cheeks, slamming against walls, blows with fists,
unofficial and unrecorded paddling in classrooms there is no way to guess.
Surely two or three times as much, perhaps five times, perhaps ten. Verified
reports are common of teachers paddling an entire class for the actions of
one or two children, or even because the class did poorly in a test. One
teacher paddled an entire class on the first day of school, "to show them
what to expect."

For every instance of physical brutality, there are many more of mental
and spiritual brutality: sarcasm, mockery, insults-what Professor of
Education Arthur Pearl, who has spent much time in classrooms himself,
calls "ceremonies of humiliation." These begin in the earliest grades, when
even the poorest children are trusting, hopeful, and in many cases incapable
of doing teachers any physical harm. There are enough examples to fill
many books. I have mentioned one; no need to recite others here.

No, the problem is not fake smiles and unmeant praise. It is far more
serious than that--a widespread dislike, distrust, and fear of children so
intense that it would not be off the mark to call it hatred. Since the roots of
these feelings lie in the insecurity, weakness, and fear of the teachers
themselves, it is hard to see how they can be quickly or easily changed,
especially since they are shared by so many of the general public.

Of course there are some teachers, just as there are some non-teachers,
who really like, trust, and respect children. But these seem almost
everywhere to be in a minority. Many of them--I have had letters from
hundreds--leave the schools after a few years. Some are fired; many more
quit. For if you like children, it is painful and soon unbearable to have to
spend your working days surrounded by people who don't-and most don't.
The evidence for this is of course not statistical. How could it be? Shall we
send teachers a poll saying, "Do you hate children?" No, the evidence comes
entirely from reports. But I have read and heard so many of these, from
students, from parents, from student teachers, from classroom volunteers,
above all from teachers themselves, as well as many others who have had
long contact with the schools, that I can only assume that what they report is
not the exception but the rule. And this violence against children, physical
and spiritual, while perhaps not the only cause, is surely a major cause of the
violence by children that everywhere fills our schools.

Behind much of what we do in school lie some ideas that could be

expressed roughly as follows: (1) Of the vast body of human knowledge,
there are certain bits and pieces that can be called essential, that everyone
should know; (2) the extent to which a person can be considered educated,
qualified to live intelligently in today's world and be a useful member of
society, depends on the amount of this essential knowledge that he carries
about with him; (3) it is the duty of schools, therefore, to get as much of this
essential knowledge as possible into the minds of children. Thus we find
ourselves trying to poke certain facts, recipes, and ideas down the gullets of
every child in school, whether the morsel interests him or not, and even if
there are other things that he is much more interested in learning.

These ideas are absurd and harmful nonsense. We will not begin to have
true education or real learning in our schools until we sweep this nonsense
out of the way. Schools should be a place where children learn what they
most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know. The child
who wants to know something remembers it and uses it once he has it; the
child who learns something to please or appease someone else forgets it
when the need for pleasing or the danger of not appeasing is past. This is
why children quickly forget all but a small part of what they learn in school.
It is of no use or interest to them; they do not want, or expect, or even intend
to remember it. The only difference between bad and good students in this
respect is that the bad students forget right away, while the good students are
careful to wait until after the exam. If for no other reason, we could well
afford to throw out most of what we teach in school because the children
throw out almost all of it anyway.

The notion of a curriculum, an essential body of knowledge, would be

absurd even if children remembered everything we "taught" them. We don't
and can't agree on what knowledge is essential. The man who has trained
himself in some special field of knowledge or competence thinks, naturally,
that his specialty should be in the curriculum. The classical scholars want
Greek and Latin taught; the historians shout for more history; the
mathematicians urge more math and the scientists more science; the modern
language experts want all children taught French, or Spanish, or Russian;
and so on. Everyone wants to get his specialty into the act, knowing that as
the demand for his special knowledge rises, so will the price that he can
charge for it. Who wins this struggle and who loses depends not on the real
needs of children or even of society, but on who is most skillful in public
relations, who has the best educational lobbyists, who best can capitalize on
events that have nothing to do with education, like the appearance of Sputnik
in the night skies.

The idea of the curriculum would not be valid even if we could agree on
what ought to be in it. For knowledge itself changes. Much of what a child
learns in school will be found, or thought, before many years, to be untrue. I
studied physics at school from a fairly up-to-date text that proclaimed that
the fundamental law of physics was the law of conservation of matter--
matter is not created or destroyed. I had to scratch that out before I left
school. In economics at college I was taught many things that were not true
of our economy then, and many more that are not true now. Not for many
years after I left college did I learn that the Creeks, far from being a
detached and judicious people surrounded by chaste white temples, were
hot-tempered, noisy, quarrelsome, and liked to cover their temples with gold
leaf and bright paint; or that most of the citizens of Imperial Rome, far from
living in houses in which the rooms surrounded an atrium, or central court,
lived in multistory tenements, one of which was perhaps the largest building
in the ancient world. The child who really remembered everything he heard
in school would live his life believing many things that were not so.

Moreover, we cannot possibly judge what knowledge will be most needed

forty, or twenty, or even ten years from now. At school, I studied Latin and
French. Few of the teachers who claimed then that Latin was essential would
make as strong a case for it now; and the French might better have been
Spanish, or better yet, Russian. Today the schools are busy teaching
Russian; but perhaps they should be teaching Chinese, or Hindi, or who-
knows-what?

When I wrote this, everyone would have laughed at the suggestion that we
might be wise to start learning Japanese.
 Besides physics, I studied chemistry, then perhaps the most popular of all
science courses; but I would probably have done better to study biology, or
ecology, if such a course had been offered (it wasn't). We always find out,
too late, that we don't have the experts we need, that in the past we studied
the wrong things; but this is bound to remain so. Since we can't know what
knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it
in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so
much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be
learned.

How can we say, in any case, that one piece of knowledge is more
important than another, or indeed, what we really say, that some knowledge
is essential and the rest, as far as school is concerned, worthless? A child
who wants to learn something that the school can't and doesn't want to teach
him will be told not to waste his time. But how can we say that what he
wants to know is less important than what we want him to know? We must
ask how much of the sum of human knowledge anyone can know at the end
of his schooling. Perhaps a millionth. Are we then to believe that one of
these millionths is so much more important than another? Or that our social
and national problems will be solved if we can just figure out a way to turn
children out of schools knowing two millionths of the total, instead of one?
Our problems don't arise from the fact that we lack experts enough to tell us
what' needs to be done, but out of the fact that we do not and will not do
what we know needs to be done now.

Learning is not everything, and certainly one piece of learning is as good

as another. One of my brightest and boldest fifth-graders was deeply
interested in snakes. He knew more about snakes than anyone I've ever
known. The school did not offer herpetology; snakes were not in the
curriculum; but as far as I was concerned, any time he spent learning about
snakes was better spent than in ways I could think of to spend it; not least of
all because, in the process of learning about snakes, he learned a great deal
more about many other things than I was able to "teach" those unfortunates
in my class who were not interested in anything at all. In another fifth- grade
class, studying Romans in Britain, I saw a boy trying to read a science book
behind the cover of his desk. He was spotted and made to put the book away
and listen to the teacher; with a heavy sigh he did so. What was gained here?
She traded a chance for an hour's real learning about science for, at best, an
hour's temporary learning about history--much more probably no learning at
all, just an hour's worth of daydreaming and resentful thoughts about school.

It is not subject matter that makes some learning more valuable than
others, but the spirit in which the work is done. If a child is doing the kind of
learning that most children do in school, when they learn at all-swallowing
words, to spit back at the teacher on demand--he is wasting his time, or
rather, we are wasting it for him. This learning will not be permanent, or
relevant, or useful. But a child who is learning naturally, following his
curiosity where it leads him, adding to his mental model of reality whatever
he needs and can find a place for, and rejecting without fear or guilt what he
does not need, is growing--in knowledge, in the love of learning, and in the
ability to learn. He is on his way to becoming the kind of person we need in
our society, and that our "best" schools and colleges are not turning out, the
kind of person who, in Whitney Griswold's words, seeks and finds meaning,
truth, and enjoyment in everything he does. All his life he will go on
learning. Every experience will make his mental model of reality more
complete and more true to life, and thus make him more able to deal
realistically, imaginatively, and constructively with whatever new
experience life throws his way.
We cannot have real learning in school if we think it is our duty and our
right to tell children what they must learn. We cannot know, at any moment,
what particular bit of knowledge or understanding a child needs most, will
most strengthen and best fit his model of reality. Only he can do this. He
may not do it very well, but he can do it a hundred times better than we can.
The most we can do is try to help, by letting him know roughly what is
available and where he can look for it. Choosing what he wants to learn and
what he does not is something he must do for himself.

There is one more reason, and the most important one, why we must reject
the idea of school and classroom as places where, most of the time, children
are doing what some adult tells them to do. The reason is that there is no
way to coerce children without making them afraid, or more afraid. We must
not try to fool ourselves into thinking that this is not so. The would-be
progressives, who until recently had great influence over most American
public school education, did not recognize this--and still do not. They
thought, or at least talked and wrote as if they thought, that there were good
ways and bad ways to coerce children (the bad ones mean, harsh, cruel, the
good ones gentle, persuasive, subtle, kindly), and that if they avoided the
bad and stuck to the good they would do no harm. This was one of their
greatest mistakes, and the main reason why the revolution they hoped to
accomplish never took hold.

The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the

inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you
think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or
not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will
happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do this in the old-
fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words,
infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the
modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and
approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by
making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague
to imagine but too implacable to escape. You can, as many skilled teachers
do, learn to tap with a word, a gesture, a look, even a smile, the great
reservoir of fear, shame, and guilt that today's children carry around inside
them. Or you can simply let your own fears about what will happen to you if
the children don't do what you want, reach out and infect them. Thus the
children will feel more and more that life is full of dangers from which only
the goodwill of adults like you can protect them, and that this goodwill is
perishable and must be earned anew each day.

The alternative--I can see no other--is to have schools and classrooms in

which each child in his own way can satisfy his curiosity, develop his
abilities and talents, pursue his interests, and from the adults and older
children around him get a glimpse of the great variety and richness of life. In
short, the school should be a great smorgasbord of intellectual, artistic,
creative, and athletic activities from which each child could take whatever
he wanted, and as much as he wanted, or as little. When Anna was in the
sixth grade, the year after she was in my class, I mentioned this idea to her.
After describing very sketchily how such a school might be run, and what
the children might do, I said, "Tell me, what do you think of it? Do you
think it would work? Do you think the kids would learn anything?" She said,
with utmost conviction, "Oh yes, it would be wonderful!" She was silent for
a minute or two, perhaps remembering her own generally unhappy
schooling. Then she said thoughtfully, "You know, kids really like to learn;
we just don't like being pushed around."

No, they don't; and we should be grateful for that. So let's stop pushing
them around, and give them a chance.
 Since I wrote this, I have stopped believing that "schools," however
organized, are the proper, or only, or best places for this. As I wrote in
Instead of Education and Teach Your Own, except in very rare
circumstances the idea of special learning places where nothing but learning
happens no longer seems to me to make any sense at all. The proper place
and best place for children to learn whatever they need or want to know is
the place where until very recently almost all children learned it--in the
world itself, in the mainstream of adult life. If we put in every community,
as we should (perhaps in former school buildings), resource and activity
centers, citizens' clubs, full of spaces for many kinds of things to happen--
libraries, music rooms, theaters, sports facilities, workshops, meeting rooms-
-these should be open to and used by young and old together. We made a
terrible mistake when (with the best of intentions) we separated children
from adults and learning from the rest of life, and one of our most urgent
tasks is to take down the barriers we have put between them and let them
come back together.

But let me leave the last word, as before, with one of the children. Anna
had been kicked out of her previous school as a hopeless student and
generally bad kid. Her parents were rich enough to hire the "best" experts in
the Boston area to deal with her. Their verdict was that she had serious
learning disabilities, to say nothing of profound emotional and psychological
disturbances. From the first day in my class, she was one of the most
delightful and rewarding children I have ever known--brave, energetic,
enthusiastic, self-motivated, high-spirited, affectionate, imaginative, talented
in many ways, and a natural leader--one of the two or three children who
made that class the most rewarding I ever taught. And as I have written else-
where, though she came to my class almost a nonreader, by the end of the
year, and without any "teaching" from me, she was reading and enjoying
large parts of Moby-Dick. She grew up to be as interesting and competent an
adult as she had been a child; when I last heard of her, as the world measures
success she had been a success in several different fields by the time she was
thirty. She did not break or let others break her spirit, the better to fit into a
dull and bad world; instead she made the world make room for her, and so in
her own way made it to some degree a livelier and better one, To help all
children do this should be our task--and our delight.
 FOONOTES
[1] Since I will be describing the work of children with the Cuisenaire rods.
A word about them is in order. Named after their inventor, a Belgian
schoolteacher, they are a set of wooden rods, or sticks, one centimeter (cm)
wide and one cm high, about the thickness of one's little finger; they vary in
length from I cm to 10 cm (1 cm = about 3\8'). Each length of rod is painted
its own color: 1 cm--white; 2 cm--red; 3 cm--light green: 4 cm--crimson
(often called "pink" by the children); 5 cm--yellow: 6 cm dark green; 7 cm--
black: 8 cm-brown: 9 cm- blue; 10 cm orange.

In writing about the use of the rods. I will often call them by their color;
but I will put their length in centimeters as a reminder, thus: yellow (5)

Anyone particularly interested in children's work with arithmetic would

probably do well to get a set of the rods. So that they may use them to see
for themselves what some of the children I describe were actually doing. For
information about the rods, write to Cuisenaire Co of America, Inc.. 12
Church St. New Rochelle, New York IO805, or Caleb Gattegno, Educational
Solutions, 80 Fifth Ave., New York, New York 10011

Though the rods were invented and first used by Cuisenaire, their use has
been greatly expanded and refined by Dr Caleb Gattengo, a British professor
of mathematics and psychology, who introduced them into many other
countries, including the United States, where they are used (and misused) in
it rapidly increasing number of schools

[2] Almost all of them said just this.

[3] Three years later, and without having given the children any preparation,
I wrote on the blackboard of a first-grade class: 2 horses + 3 cows = ? A
number of the children gave me the answer “5 animals.”

[4] Later, some of her math teachers did consider her a slow pupil.

END