Frontier High School

From How Children Fail

By John Holt

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 through the grades and out of the schools, whether they know anything or not. There are many more such children then 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 of 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 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 there heads? Why don’t they make use of more of their capacity?

Write a 2 page journal in response to this article. Some points to consider:

1.   Start with a summary of this article.  (3-5 sentences, and include the author and title)

2.   Do you agree with the points made in this article? Why or why not? 

3.   Some students don’t want to disappoint parents, teachers, etc., but others don’t care?  Why?  What can be done to make them care?

4.   Why are some students successful and not others?

5.   Who is at fault?

6.   What can be done?

7.   Share any personal experiences with “failure.” Explain the situation, the outcome, and was anything gained?

I don’t expect you to have ALL the answers, just interested in your thoughts!