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All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words—Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. …to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
What we have to do is break this long downward cycle of fear and distrust, and trust children as we ourselves were not trusted. To do this will take a long leap of faith—but great rewards await any of us who will take that leap. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
The schools cling more and more stubbornly to their mistaken idea that education and teaching are industrial processes, to be designed and planned from above in the minutest detail and then imposed on passive teachers and their even more passive students. ~John Holt
This #book is more concerned with describing effective learning than explaining it, or giving a theory about it. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
What teachers and learners need to know is what we have known for some time: first, that vivid, vital, pleasurable experiences are the easiest to remember, and secondly, that memory works best when unforced, that it is not a mule that can be made to walk by beating it. ~John Holt
This notion…that organisms, including human beings, are nothing but machines, is for me one of the most mistaken, foolish, harmful, and dangerous of all the many bad ideas at large in the world today. If an idea can be evil, this one surely is. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…we hear much talk about “acceptable risks,” as if it were morally acceptable to bring sickness or death to considerable numbers of people as long as you couldn’t be sure which ones they were… ~John Holt #quote
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.” ~John Holt
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. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
They [children] understand it [education] as being made to go to a place called school, and there being made to learn something they don’t much want to learn, under the threat that bad things will be done to them if they don’t. ~John Holt #education
Instinct of Workmanship
Children don’t seem to be born fearful. … It looks very much as if children catch most of their fears from their elders. ~John Holt
Most of the fear that children catch is of a more subtle kind. They catch it bit by bit, in very small doses. ~John Holt
The word no, for a two-year-old, is the Declaration of Independence and Magna Charta rolled into one. ~John Holt #autonomy
Oddly enough, most people seem alarmed by the first signs of independence in small children. ~John Holt
How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task. ~John Holt, How Children Learn #learning
When people are down, it’s useless to push them…; that just frightens and discourages them more. What we have to do is draw back, take off the pressure, reassure them, …give them time to regain—as in time they will—enough energy and courage to go back to the task. ~John Holt
...the best games with little children flow easily and naturally from the situation of the moment. ~John Holt
We are not likely to get good games by planning them far in advance, but we probably will get them if we play with children just for the fun of it. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Interesting to see how much of their later selves children reveal even when they are very little. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
...resistance to unasked-for teaching is not uncommon in small children, but usual. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
If they [children] need help, they will ask for it—at least, as long as we give it when it is asked for. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
I hadn’t asked him [Tommy, 4 or 5] to [help me], and didn’t reward him for doing it. But he saw real work being done and wanted to be part of it. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
After about 4 days…one of the teachers came out…and said to please stop playing… it made her too nervous. So that was the end of that. But it was interesting to see…how energetically…most…children tackled the problem of getting a sound out of a difficult instrument. ~J.Holt
On days when I have a lesson, I bring my cello to school, take it to a classroom, and give the children a turn at “playing” it. Except for the timid ones, …almost all little children attack the cello in the same way. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
They are really doing three things at once. They are making the machine go. They are enjoying the luxury of making sounds. And they are making scientific experiments. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
I have seen…young children try out the cello.… I always play if asked… When I then ask…if they want a turn, the children all start out by trying…to do just what I was doing. They are not so much trying to figure out how to play the cello as actually playing it. ~John Holt
I have never seen a young child look disappointed by the results of what he was doing with the instrument. I suspect that they begin simply by trying to do on the cello as much of what they have seen me do as they possibly can. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
The line between fantasy and reality is so unclear for children that they are perfectly able to stand comfortably with one foot on one side and one on the other. And perhaps…just making the cello go is absorbing and exciting enough to take all their attention. ~John Holt
But then, after a while, they realize that they really are not making quite the same kinds of sounds that I made. …they begin to realize that their cello playing is only fantasy, and…they…begin to want to try to figure out how the cello really works. ~John Holt
Where the young child, at least until his thinking has been spoiled by adults, has a great advantage is in situations—and many, even most real life situations are like this—where there is so much seemingly senseless data that it is impossible to tell what questions to ask ~J.Holt
Above all, he [or she] is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
I now feel strongly that much of the time infants are…actually trying to speak, that is, to use sounds to convey wishes, feelings, and meanings. ~John Holt, How Children Learn #language
It is a remarkable business. We are so used to talking that we forget that it takes a very subtle and complicated coordination of lips, tongue, teeth, palate, jaws, cheeks, voice, and breath. ~John Holt, How Children Learn #language
We realize how difficult speech is only when we first try to make the sounds of a #language very different from our own. … Yet every child learns to make the sounds of his own language. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
We assume that since words are the shortest and simplest elements of language, when we learn language we learn words first. But it is far more likely that we learn words last. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
We should…remember that children…, and above all young children, know and understand much more than they can put into words. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…much of what we do and say in school only makes children feel that they do not know things that, in fact, they knew perfectly well before we began to talk about them. I have often seen this in mathematics… ~John Holt, How Children Learn
A child’s understanding of the world is uncertain & tentative. If we question him too much or too sharply, we are more likely to weaken that understanding than strengthen it. His understanding will grow faster if we can make ourselves have faith in it and leave it alone. ~J. Holt
…if we put too much pressure…by continually asking children questions…we are liable to…convince the children that they don’t know anything, can’t figure out anything, and must depend on us for all their information. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
I suspect that most people who try to talk…to children will have so much more teaching in their voices than love and pleasure that they will wind up doing more harm than good. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
All that talk...was not honest talk, but teaching talk. ~John Holt #quote
I have long felt that the passionate anger of so many crying two- or three-year-olds comes...from their feeling...that they have not been understood, or worse, that no one has even tried to understand them, that their words have been ignored or...brushed aside. ~John Holt
...we can easily underestimate the seriousness of many of their questions and concerns, and either laugh at them indulgently or ignore them altogether. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
... even such close and sympathetic observers of children as Piaget and Bettelheim have consistently and gravely underestimated the intellectual capacity of children... ~John Holt, How Children Learn
...we cannot learn anything important about other people until they trust us... ~John Holt, How Children Learn #quote
Anyone who makes it his life work to help other people may come to believe that they cannot get along without him, and may not want to hear evidence that they can... ~John Holt
Many people seem to have built their lives around the notion that they are in some way indispensable to children, and to question this is to attack the very center of their being. ~John Holt
An adult who is mainly interested in a child’s...adventures doesn’t talk in quite the same tones as one who is mainly interested in finding ways to correct her speech, and children are very good at telling the difference. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
The teacher devil in me made me do it. I just couldn’t resist the sudden temptation to be so clever... ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…the organism…is smart; it wants to do things right, and when someone “shows” it how, in a way it can understand and believe, it changes at once. ~John Holt, How Children Learn #change
…as a…cellist I have in recent years made several changes… In some cases I had been doing something wrong without knowing it. In other cases I had been deliberately doing something that I later came to feel was wrong, that some expert…had advised me to do. ~John Holt #change
Among experts there can be great differences of opinion... ~John Holt #quote
…the point here is not that good habits are unimportant. They often are. The point is that if it takes a long time to develop a good habit, it will take just as long to develop a bad one. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…we don’t…have to be in such a big hurry to correct children’s mistakes. We can afford to give them time to…correct them themselves. …the more they do this, the better they will become at doing it… The less they…depend on us, the faster they can teach themselves. ~John Holt
Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Yet it is important that we should, because they are perceptive and sensitive, and very easily hurt, humiliated, and discouraged. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
It can’t be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one—when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own. ~John Holt
Most of the time, most of us do not like at all to be confronted with someone who knows a great deal more about something than we do. Though I have recovered a lot of the child’s curiosity that I lost during my schooling, I still often sense this reaction in myself. ~John Holt
Even in the privacy of our own minds, we do not like to be made to feel ignorant and stupid. Confronted with what we do not know, we try to protect ourselves by saying that it is not worth knowing. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
This spirit of independence in learning is one of the most valuable assets a learner can have, and we … must learn to respect and encourage it. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Interesting, but not surprising; the things we learn because, for our own reasons, we really need to know them, we don’t forget. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
We are so used to the feeling of knowing what we know, or think we know, that we forget what it is like to learn something new and strange. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Children’s first hunches about anything are extremely faint and tentative, the merest wisps of intuition that a certain thing may be so. Each time children test one of these faint hunches and have it confirmed by experience, the hunch becomes a bit stronger. ~John Holt
…one of the reasons I have been so slow to learn is that I have not been willing enough to trust my hunches… ~John Holt #quote
I am only just beginning to get over this crippling habit. And I would certainly never get over it if I had someone pouncing on me every time I made a mistake. ~John Holt
Knowing this about children’s hunches makes me understand more clearly than ever why, and how, our constant checking up on children’s learning so often prevents and destroys learning, and even in time most of the capacity to learn. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested…severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know. ~John Holt
Asking children questions about things they are only just beginning to learn is like sitting in a chair which has only just been glued. The structure collapses. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Under pressure, children stop trying to confirm and strengthen their faint hunches. Instead, they just give them up. … In its place they have only the adult expert’s answer to his own question, a very bad substitute. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
The worst damage we do with all this testing is to the children’s own confidence and self-esteem, their belief that others trust them to learn and that they can therefore trust themselves. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…every unasked for test is above all else a statement of no confidence in the learner. That I check up at all on what you have learned proves that I fear you have not really learned it. For young children, these repeated votes of no confidence can be devastating. ~John Holt
Nobody, not even adults, likes to be corrected. ~John Holt #quote
…in reading, as in everything else, children seek out meaning, which is to say, whatever helps them make the most sense of the world they live in. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
We can hardly ever hurt children by putting too much information within their reach. As long as we don’t try to force them to learn it all, they will use what they need and set the rest aside for later. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
…teachers not only like right answers, they like them right away. ~John Holt
The result of this is a great loss. The more a child uses his sense of consistency, of things fitting together and making sense, to find and correct his own mistakes, the more he will feel that his way of using his mind works, and the better he will get at it. ~John Holt
…when they learn in their own way and for their own reasons, children learn so much more rapidly and effectively than we could possibly teach them… ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
All over the world, children acquire this extraordinary amount of information, most of it by the time they are six, and most of it, as I have described, by themselves, without anything that we could call formal instruction. ~John Holt, How Children Learn #language
If from the start they could think of #writing as a way of saying something, and #reading as a way of knowing what others are saying, they would write and read with much more interest and excitement. ~John Holt, How Children Learn
Children know all too well when people respect and trust them and when they don’t… ~John Holt, How Children Learn
