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John Holt
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Here are some notes from my reading of "How Children Fail", by John Holt -

Holt's writing about education inspired
Grace Llewellyn, author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, a book about how teens can quit school and teach themselves.

How Children Fail, John Holt -

Holt was both a teacher and a classroom observer in the USA in the late 1950's. The book is mostly a collection of his notes. He organizes his notes into four parts: Strategy, Fear and Failure, Real Learning, and How Schools Fail. The first part describes how children (around the 5th grade level) learn to give teachers the answers they want with the least effort and pain. Holt sounds at times a bit judgmental of the children but overall seems to realize that it is primarily the system that creates the children's behavior.

Amazon page on John Holt

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Note: my comments are in brackets []

Introduction

"The basic quality of our emotional maturity, we now realize, is largely the result of the relationship between parent and child." p 11 (Allan Fromme, Ph. D.)

Fromme says we know very little about the interaction between the teacher and child and about the influences they have on one another. He asks: What does the child hear when he is called upon? What does he feel?..... What does the teacher think and feel and do as he awaits the answer? Does he understand the meaning of the child's answer or see it merely as right or wrong?" p 12

"Does his relationship with the child have the intimacy ideally needed for intellectual growth or is it a dull, contractual one which fosters non-learning as much as it does learning?"

Fromme says in effect that teachers must have the sensitivity to perceive many aspects of the child's needs. He says that without such a sensitivity teachers can be "no more successful in the classroom than in their marriages."

He says we "cannot legislate sensitivity and intimacy into existence." [But I would say we can legislate it out of existence.] He also says we cannot "command perception." p 13

So what we must do instead, he say is give "specific, concrete examples" which help the teacher "see" the child [most importantly his feelings & the younger the child, the more important the feelings]

He says instead of teaching [encouraging, supporting, fostering] things like curiosity [and cooperation, independence, responsibility, empathy, love of learning] "the subject matter becomes an end in itself."

 
p 15

John Holt starts the foreword to the book with "Most children in school fail."

He says not only do many fail academically, but more fail because they"

"...fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives.

"Why do they fail?

"They fail because they are afraid, bored and confused. p 16

"They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults all around them...

"They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities and talents.

He says they are confused because most of what they hear makes little sense. And because "it often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know--to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds."

 
Part 1 - Strategy

"When I started teaching I thought some people were just born smarter than others and that not much could be done about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It isn't hard to believe if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or in the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl who under some circumstances is witty, observant, analytical, imaginative, in a word, intelligent, come into the classroom, and as if by magic, turn into a complete idiot?

The worst student we had, the worst student I have ever encountered, was in his life outside the classroom, as mature, intelligent and interesting a student as anyone at school. What went wrong? Experts muttered to his parents about brain damage-- a handy way to end a mystery that you can't explain otherwise. Somewhere along the line his intelligence became disconnected from his schooling. Where? Why?" p 25-26

Part 1 - Strategy

"When I started teaching I thought some people were just born smarter than others and that not much could be done about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It isn't hard to believe if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or in the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl who under some circumstances is witty, observant, analytical, imaginative, in a word, intelligent, come into the classroom, and as if by magic, turn into a complete idiot?

The worst student we had, the worst student I have ever encountered, was in his life outside the classroom, as mature, intelligent and interesting a student as anyone at school. What went wrong? Experts muttered to his parents about brain damage-- a handy way to end a mystery that you can't explain otherwise. Somewhere along the line his intelligence became disconnected from his schooling. Where? Why?" p 25-26

 
Misc Quotes


“Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”

 
“We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”
 
“A child whose life is full of the threat and fear of punishment is locked into babyhood. There is no way for him to grow up, to learn to take responsibility for his life and acts. Most important of all, we should not assume that having to yield to the threat of our superior force is good for the child's character. It is never good for anyone's character.”  
“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.  
“Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons:

1. They think that raising their children is their business not the government’s;

2. They enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don’t want to give that up to others;

3. They want to keep them from being hurt mentally, physically and emotionally.

 
“The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.”  
“If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.”  
“To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.”  
“Over the years, I have noticed that the child who learns quickly is adventurous. She's ready to run risks. She approaches life with arms outspread. She wants to take it all in. She still has the desire of the very young child to make sense out of things. She's not concerned with concealing her ignorance or protecting herself. She's ready to expose herself to disappointment and defeat. She has a certain confidence. She expects to make sense out of things sooner or later. She has a kind of trust.”  
“We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions... and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”  
“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.”  
“People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.”  
“Schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat.”  
“By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child’, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good”  
“It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.”  
“We who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference, are probably no more than one percent of the population, if that. And we are not likely to become the majority in my lifetime. This doesn't trouble me much anymore, as long as this minority keeps on growing. My work is to help it grow.  
“The book will be a demonstration that children, without being coerced or manipulated, or being put in exotic, specially prepared environments, or having their thinking planned and ordered for them, can, will and do pick up from the world around them important information about what we call the Basics. It will also demonstrate that "ordinary" people, without special schooling themselves, can give their children whatever slight assistance may be needed to help them in their exploration of the world, and that to do this requires no more than a little tact, patience, attention and readily available information. ”  
“We learn to do something by doing it.
There is no other way.
 
“Real social change is a process that takes place over time, usually quite a long time. At a given moment in history, 99 percent of a society may think and act one way on a certain matter, and only 1 percent think and act very differently. In time, that 1 percent may become 2 percent, then 5 percent, then 10, 20, 30 percent, until finally it becomes the dominant majority, and social change has taken place.”  
“The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.”  
“Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.”  
“Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives.”  
“It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”