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Why most children fail in school
from Sunday Observer, December 19, 1999

A book review -How Children Fail
With the introduction and implementation of UPE, many children in Tanzania are enrolled in school each year. Again, recently there has been talk of raising our education standards. What is the intended goal? Is it to have classrooms over-flooded with children? Is it to make sure that children know what they are supposed to know before letting them into the next grade? Or is it to provide a good and effective learning environment and conditions?

The experience we have is that most of these children fail in school. They complete their schooling only because we have agreed to push them up through the grades and out of schools whether they know anything or not. "How Children Fail?" by John Holt tries to give reasons for this problem.

Principally, Holt says that children from the time of birth to up three years have a tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and creating. This is an ability which they are born with, and they really make full use of it during the first three years of their life. However, as they grow old and go to school, they fail to develop more, and the causes for this are narrated by the author at length.

The book is divided into five sections preceded by two prefaces. The author narrates his personal observation as a teacher in the form of memos to his colleagues. He gives examples of different situations which he observed and tried to experiment by using different approaches or methods and in the end he got satisfying responses from the children. He began to research on the reasons why children fail to develop their capacity further at school age.

He discovered that before the child is sent to school, he feels free to learn and discover things he is interested in, and sometimes seeks solutions from willing adults around him. He does so in order to create .his own happy universe. As soon as the child is enrolled in school, he finds himself being taught things which often contradict other things he has been told. Even the teachers are not as friendly as the adults at home. This makes the child afraid, bored and confused. They become afraid because they have been told they are at school in order to learn and pass exams and the fear comes when they think of failing the exams, which they know will disappoint and displease the adults around them. They get bored because they learn things which do not interest them and they learn them in the most monotonous and dull ways which make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities and talents.

In discussing this issue, the author has come up with four major topics which he feels contribute a lot to the failure of children in school. Taking the example of boredom, he says that children use various strategies to dodge or meet the demands put on them by adults. Some of the strategies include:


In the second topic, the author discusses fear and failure, analyzing the interaction between children and teachers. The effects of this interaction on the children's strategies and learning are very adverse. He cites corporal punishment as one bad interaction which ruins children's appetites for learning. He says these ceremonies of humiliation start as early as possible just when the children are trusting, hopeful and incapable of doing any physical harm to teachers.

The teachers resort to harmful acts because they lack self-confidence in their competence. Their thinking is so dormant that they can't think of initiating new ways or changing their methods of teaching. Why don't they think of how better they can teach children to read, add or even paint? This can make their daily work as teachers extremely challenging and exciting.

Topic three or chapter three deals with the meaning of real learning. He says there is a difference between what children appear to know, or are expected to know and what they really want to know. However, this does not mean that each child should be taught or learn what he wants but teachers should pay attention and develop the child more in whatever talent they show to posses. Learning is not necessarily only the three Rs.

Topic number four deals with the strategies which the schools develop and apply in teaching.

These strategies do a lot of harm to children because they raise fears in children; they produce learning which is usually fragmentary, distorted and short-lived. Generally these strategies fail to meet the real needs of children.

In simpler words, schools do not provide the knowledge which will help in the future lives of these children. To sum up his work, Holt gives his opinions on what he thinks schools should be. He says that schools should be places where children learn what they most want to know and not what teachers think they ought to know.

As discussed in topic three, children should be allowed to learn naturally by following their curiosity, adding to his mental model of reality so that he can keep what he needs and reject without fear or quilt what he does not need. Through this process he is growing in knowledge, in the love of learning and in the ability to learn.

The book is recommended for anyone who deals with children and who cares about children.

Title: How Children Fail
Author: John Holt

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