Pakcik Holt

Ok saya sangat obsess dengan ideologies John Holt. The feeling of reading this book is like watching a horror movie. It really is okeh.

Is school that bad for children?

To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid (p.263)

We encourage children to act stupidly, not only by scaring and confusing them, but 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. (p.276)

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 of 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. (p.273-274)

Dia pon ada mengomen cikgucikgu muda dengan mengatakan:

They need a job and a paycheck, right now. Schoolteaching 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 good luck to find? ... 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 children, to make them even more insecure, anxious and fearful than they are themselves. (p. 280-281)

Sentences above are quoted from Holt in his book. Jadi, jangan condemn saya untuk apaapa ;). Just sharing knowledge.

Seriously, I never think that school is a bad place for children. But to some extent, it might be. Walau camnepon, pakcikni sangat over. Teruk sangat ke sekolah tu? Hurm

Bukan senang mau jadi cikgu.

Many of them - I have had letters from hundreds - leave the school after a few years. Some are fired; many more quit. For you if you like children, it is painful and soon unbearable to have to spend your working days surrounded by people who dont- and most dont. (p.288)