Education Is Bad For Children

For thousands of years, formal education has been considered the best and the shortest way to access knowledge of the world around us and to give us a better life. Education is always among the top priority of any nation’s policy and planning. In almost every country no matter poor or rich, there are increasingly large amount of money spent on improving educational system and building more schools. First published in the magazine The Saturday Evening Post in 1969, John Holt’s essay titled “School is bad for children”, however, drew my attention and raised in my mind the question: Have schools lived up to people’s expectation to help children develop in the best way? As far as I am concerned, schooling with certain defects has not yet fulfilled the mission to educate children.

Every child is a natural learner. According to Holt (1969) a child finds out and learns to use language, a complicated thing by observing, experiencing, changing, developing and completing it himself before being aware of what it is and before being taught at school. They learn as their instinct, with their curiosity about the world around

However, they haven’t thought of some bad influence that school environment has on their students. People think that rewarding, marking and praising their children absolutely motivate and help them to progress, but actually it puts children under pressure of competitiveness and not being wrong. As a result, they “dodge, bluff, fake and cheat” to get good marks and without being “bribed, bullied or conned into doing it” they will not do anything (Holt, 1969). These bad habits will be with them in their adult life, holding them back in whatever they are doing and furthermore, creating a society of stagnation without perks and