John Holt in ‘What Do I Do Monday?’

“One of the things adults do, and above all in schools, is invade, in every possible way, the lives and privacy of their students. There are master keys to the students’ ‘lockers’ in schools, so that administrators may search them any time they feel like it. There are almost no places in most schools where students may talk together. The whole hair battle, which some schools, thank goodness, have given up, was only a way of saying, ‘Nothing about you is yours, everything about you is ours, you belong wholly to us, you can withhold nothing.’ And I think with deep regret and shame of the times when I, like millions of other adults, scolding a child or ordering him about, have said, ‘Take that expression off your face!’ It seems now an extraordinary and unforgivable crime against the human person, the human spirit.”

~ John Holt in ‘What Do I Do Monday?’



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