[C]hildren who generally fear and dislike S-chool, but cannot escape it, may be more able to cope with it if (1) they are not made to feel that they are bad because they don’t like S-chool, and (2) they feel that their parents understand and agree with their reasons for not liking S-chool. It would help at least some unhappy children if their parents would say to them, “I understand how you feel about that place, and I agree with you. I would feel the same way if I had to go there myself, and I would get you out of there if I could. But I can’t, so the best thing for us to do is put our heads together and see how we can make the best of it.” The child would be stronger for feeling he had an ally. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 213]
Let us cease looking upon the people’s resistance to our education as upon a hostile element of pedagogics, but, on the contrary, let us see in it an expression of the people’s will which alone ought to guide our activities. … [F]or the educating class to know what is good and what bad, the classes which receive the education must have the full power to express their dissatisfaction, or, at least, to swerve from the education which instinctively does not satisfy them,—that the criterion of pedagogics is only liberty. [Leo Tolstoy, “On Popular Education,” 1862, Tolstoy On Education, translated by Leo Wiener, Phoenix / U of Chicago P, 1967, pp. 28-30]
[O]ne of [Paul] Goodman’s most important points is that the deviant child who is not “playing the game of schooling” is making a non-verbal or behavioural request for an alternative learning environment. And Goodman never tired of pointing out that the educational system in the United States was inadequate partly because it viewed education in an extremely narrow sense. [Ronald Swartz, “A Dialogue on Education for Autonomy: An Interview with Ronald Swartz and Thomas Szasz,” Interchange, Vol. 20 No. 4, 1989, pp. 32-47, https://www.scribd.com/document/208577575/A-Dialogue-on-Education-for-Autonomy-An-Interview-with-Thomas-Szasz]
“Only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged.” [John Holt, How Children Learn, 1967] And in this lies the problem with this particular artificial system: When children struggle with it, “school” pushes us, with overwhelming force, toward fixing the child—figuring our what’s wrong with that little psyche that’s causing them to feel humiliation, fright, discouragement, boredom, disengagement—rather than questioning the system. [Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education, W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, pp. 6-7]
[W]ise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment). [Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Basic Books, 2006, pp. 152-153]
Our schools, as currently structured, are designed for one type of person: the conforming test taker. … Yet [some students] don’t care about tests and don’t enjoy sitting at a desk. They may become school failures or indifferent students, not because of lack of intelligence or sensitivity but because of the nature of their intelligence and sensitivities. They are resisters who protect that part of themselves that they want to develop in the future; they will not conform and risk losing their own unique strengths in the process. As a consequence, they become problems at home as well as at school because most parents buy the notion that school success is a sign of intelligence and that school failure is a sign of pathology. Too many parents also accept the propaganda that school success is somehow related to success in future life and, often with the best intentions, make themselves and their children neurotic over grades. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, pp. 44-45]
[S]chools typically give low status to so-called nonacademic work, including the visual and performing arts, physical education, and practical and “vocational” programs. The result is that very many students, even those who are good at academic work, never discover the real range of their aptitudes, especially if they lie in these other, neglected areas. …
[B]ecause they have such a narrow view of ability, school systems usually promote a very wide idea of disability. … These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all. [Ken Robinson, Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, Viking / Penguin, 2013, pp. 63-65]
To many children, school represents a “second chance”—an opportunity to acquire a better sense of self and a better vision of life than was offered in their home. …
But for some children, school is a legally enforced incarceration at the hands of teachers who lack either the self-esteem or the training or both to do their jobs properly. These are teachers who do not inspire but humiliate. They do not speak the language of courtesy and respect but of ridicule and sarcasm. With invidious comparisons they flatter one student at the expense of another. With unmanaged impatience they deepen a child’s terror of making mistakes. They have no other notion of discipline than threats of pain. They do not motivate by offering values but by evoking fear. They do not believe in a child’s possibilities; they believe only in limitations. They do not light fires in minds, they extinguish them. Who cannot recall encountering at least one such teacher during one’s school years? [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, pp. 202-203]
[T]he greatest mental health need in the school is informed and mentally healthy adults … [S]ometimes the sanest element in the school are the children, who fight to keep from drowning as the ocean of adult disorientation beats upon them. [Jules Henry, Jules Henry on Education, Vintage / Random House, 1972, p. 25]
In today’s schools, it is rare to find teachers who hold high academic and moral standards for their students. Instead, too many of today’s teachers work with an air of professional detachment from their students, allowing students to just get by with minimal contributions and efforts. … In effect, the teachers tells the student: If you show enough “learning” so as not to embarrass either of us, I will let you pass through this course with the credentials that you need to complete your requirements. Mediocrity becomes the norm—even a dreary goal of sorts—for both teacher and student. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 196-197]
Children don’t like school because to them school is—dare I say it—prison. Children don’t like school because, like all human beings, they crave freedom, and in school they are not free. …
Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it. It’s not polite. We all tiptoe around this truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison or working for an institution that imprisons children? How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison? [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, p. 67]
[M]uch of what is disturbing about students’ attitudes and behavior may be a function of the fact that they have little to say about what happens to them all day. They are compelled to follow someone else’s rules, study someone else’s curriculum, and submit continually to someone else’s evaluation. The mystery, really, is not that so many students are indifferent about what they have to do in school but that any of them are not. [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept. 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
At present, in most states, for 10 to 13 years every young person is obliged to sit the better part of his day in a room almost always too crowded, facing front, doing lessons predetermined by a distant administration at the state capital and that have no relation to his own intellectual, social, or animal interests, and not much relation even to his economic interests. The overcrowding precludes individuality or spontaneity, reduces the young to ciphers, and the teacher to a martinet. If a youth tries to follow his own bent, he is interrupted and even jailed. If he does not perform, he is humiliated and threatened, but he is not allowed to fail and get out. Middle class youth go through this for at least four more years—at the college level, the overcrowding has become an academic scandal—but they are steeled to it and supported by their middle-class anxiety and middle-class perquisites, including money to spend. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, p. 56]
Children do not like being incompetent any more than they like being ignorant. They want to learn how to do, and do well, the things they see being done by bigger people around them. This is why they soon find school such a disappointment; they so seldom get a chance to learn anything important or do anything real. [John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, 1974, HoltGWS, 2013, p. 73]
Whatever significance schooling might once have held for the majority of youngsters in our society, it no longer holds significance for many of them. Most students (and, for that matter, many parents and teachers) cannot provide compelling reasons for attending school. … The real world appears elsewhere: in the media, in the marketplace, and all too frequently in the demimonde of drugs, violence, and crime. Much if not most of what happens in schools happens because that is the way it was done in earlier generations, not because we have a convincing rationale for maintaining it today. The often-heard statement that school is basically custodial rather than educational harbors more than a grain of truth. [Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books, 1991, pp. 200-202]
Society is not willing to let adolescents run loose and parents are not willing to tend them at home. Therefore they must go to school. Almost all teachers, from kindergarten to graduate school, are to a greater or lesser degree being paid to keep students in a room or busy with homework who don’t want to be there. … The schools that most middle-class students attend are not really cruel or oppressive; teachers sincerely ask for thinking, problem-solving, doubting, rationality, critical thinking, and genuine discussion among students. Nothing makes the teacher’s life easier than truly to interest students in these activities. But all these activities, and rationality itself, are tainted because deep down so many teachers are also using them instrumentally in order to kill time and babysit. [Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, Oxford UP, 1986, pp. 91-92]
For too many of our children, school activities seem devoid of meaning and isolated from the rest of their lives. … [T]he academic agenda of schooling—the subject matter, the problem solving, the famed “three Rs”—is all taken as beside the point, useless, something that one does out of drab necessity. Their performance is perfunctory, a cheerless going-through-the-motions.
It is a principle of human development that, over time, one becomes what one does. …
A child who spends her precious years of school life in ritualistic, barren exercises learns a pattern of vacuous response that can diminish the child’s future efforts and future aspirations. Going through the motions of learning out of dreary obligation is not a benign experience for a child. It is a deadening one. It can lead to an intransigent sense of disinterest in learning and achievement. …
[T]hese children are acquiring habits … of idleness, of getting by with the least possible effort, of cynicism about the very possibility of achievement. They are habits of shirking, of ineptitude, of willed incompetence. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 34-35]
Most young people find school hard to use. Indeed, many young people find school a negative learning environment. Not only do schools fail to help students become competent in important life skills, they provide a warped image of learning as something that takes place only in schools, segregated from the real world, organized by disciplines and school bells, and assessed by multiple-choice, paper-and-pencil tests. Schools have scores of written and unwritten rules that stifle young people’s innate drive for learning and restrict their choices about at what they want to excel, when to practice, from whom to learn, and how to learn. It is no wonder that so many creative and entrepreneurial youth disengage from productive learning. They recognize that staying in the schools we offer them constitutes dropping out from the real world. [Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski, Leaving to Learn] quoted by [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, p. 149]
[Schools] are teaching [our kids] that learning is to be equated with tedium, senseless tasks, arbitrary directives, a mindless competition for favor, and the stifling of curiosity. The public school system is an authoritarian, procrustean bureaucracy to which every child is expected to adjust himself. Ignoring the uniqueness of each individual, it expects all children of a given age to learn the same things at the same time in the same way. If a child does not meet expectations, the system assumes there is something wrong with him, not the school. Naturally, most students, if not humiliated and terrified, are bored. [Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 81]
The high school is an ungracious institution. … This is its peculiar lack and the source of its treachery to adolescents. It cannot be counted on for generosity, for imagination, or for style. Its staff has on the whole too little confidence in its own dignity or judgment, and too little respect for that of others. It seldom understands how these are derived from personal experience and expressed in individual action. It is composed chiefly of individuals who have achieved their own basis of security by cautious attention to external norms—and these not the most generous. It does not ask of a student whether in a particular action he is being true to himself and his own nature, but whether he is doing what the school ought to expect. If he isn’t, it tries to be fair—it wants very much to be fair. But it is usually too frightened. …
A school that restricts freedom, invades privacy, and limits enterprise in order to promote normality is certainly not going to promote growth. Yet the average teacher or school administrator could hardly be expected to see personality development as a process of individuation; the whole process by which he himself has been selected mitigates against it. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 125-126]
In the name of education, we have increasingly deprived children of the time and freedom they need to educate themselves through their own means. And in the name of safety, we have deprived children of the freedom they need to develop the understanding, courage, and confidence required to face life’s dangers and challenges with equanimity. … We have created a world in which children must suppress their natural instincts to take charge of their own education and, instead, mindlessly follow paths to nowhere laid out for them by adults. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, pp. 19-20]
One of the tragedies of our system of schooling is that it teaches students that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others’ judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, p. 75]
Every instruction ought to be only an answer to the questions put by life, whereas school not only does not call forth questions, but does not even answer those that are called forth by life. [Leo Tolstoy, “On Popular Education,” 1862, Tolstoy On Education, translated by Leo Wiener, Phoenix / U of Chicago P, 1967, p. 15]
Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence … The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other … [John Gatto, “The Seven-Lesson School Teacher,” 1991, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, pp. 1-4]
Students recognize that it would be impossible to delve deeply into their school subjects, even if they wanted to. Time does not permit it. They must follow the schedule set by the school. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, p. 80]
[Less than 4 percent of students in middle and high school] report a learning environment that regularly lets them: develop their own ideas; learn something they are interested in; choose how to do their work; have a say about what happens to them. [Winthrop, Shoukry, and Nitkin, The Disengagement Gap, 2025]
Excellent teachers strive to provide these opportunities, but they are often held back by the traditional school system, which is designed to transmit knowledge and to sort and rank. [Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, Crown / Penguin Random House, 2025, pp. 18-19]
There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. …
I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. [John Gatto, “The Seven-Lesson School Teacher,” 1991, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, p. 10]
[S]chools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities. They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop—then they blame the family for its failure to be a family. It’s like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent. [John Gatto, “We Need Less School, Not More,” 1992, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, p. 67]
Schools seem to me among the most anti-democratic, most authoritarian, most destructive, and most dangerous institutions of modern society. No other institution does more harm or more lasting harm to more people or destroys so much of their curiosity, independence, trust, dignity, and sense of identity and worth. …
Schools do not protect children from the badness of the world outside. They are at least as bad as the world outside, and the harm they do to the children in their power creates much of the badness of the world outside. The sickness of the modern world is in many ways a school-induced sickness. It is in school that most people learn to expect and accept that some expert can always place them in some sort of rank or hierarchy. It is in school that we meet, become used to, and learn to believe in the totally controlled society. We do not learn much science, but we learn to worship “scientists” and to believe that anything we might conceivably need or want can only come, and someday will come, from them. The school is the closest we have yet been able to come to Huxley’s Brave New World, with its alphas and betas, deltas and epsilons—and now it even has its soma. Everyone, including children, should have the right to say “No!” to it. [John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, 1974, HoltGWS, 2013, pp. 167-168]
[T]oo often when kids are resisting, adults see them as problem children rather than children with problems.
Resistance is your kids’ way of using what power they have to let you know things are not working. Since they are young, it often comes out in ways that seem strange to adults. Rarely do students give parents, teachers, or coaches a self-reflective soliloquy on the reasons they are resisting, their feelings and struggles. Instead, what you see is a pain-in-the-ass kid. For kids themselves, it is a cry for help. Instead of labeling children, parents need to listen.
Kids in resister mode are desperately using what is under their control to make their voices heard. And they often are resisting for good reasons. …
Adults in families, school, and communities can help kids build agency and point in a better direction. Every time a parent or teacher or coach sees a kid resisting and tries to understand what is driving their behavior before doling out consequences, they are helping children develop the self-reflection skills that are part of having agency. … When adults help young people not only self-reflect but also think critically about what they need and help them build strategies to move forward, they are helping them build agency. Ultimately, this agency empowers adolescents to leverage the resources and assistance they need to overcome barriers and pursue goals they have identified as important. [Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, Crown / Penguin Random House, 2025, pp. 88-90]
Related:
– What are the effects of coercion in education?
– Why is it important for young people to take on responsibility? What opportunities do they have for substantive responsibility?
– What is “reality of encounter” and why is it important in education?
– How does our experience of school resources differ from those outside of school?