We are seeing something new in human history, a generation or two of children who have most of their daydreams made for them.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:15pm on October 21, 2017But children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do–read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:15pm on October 21, 2017Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:14pm on October 21, 2017They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:14pm on October 21, 2017It seemed as if their schooling had been for so long so far removed from reality that they were no longer able to see reality, to grasp it, to come to grips with it.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:14pm on October 21, 2017The children, of course, were not drawing a tree but what they had learned to recognize as a symbol of a tree, almost like a large hieroglyph. The lines they put on the paper did not look to them like a tree; they meant tree.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:13pm on October 21, 2017Pictures are flat; life has depth. The business of turning real objects into flat pictures is a convention, like language, and like language, it must be learned.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:13pm on October 21, 2017Now and then he would say indignantly, “Too much peoples!” To which I could only agree.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:13pm on October 21, 2017He finds it mysterious and exciting that the label that said FRUIT COCKTAIL yesterday still says it today–always says it. And indeed it is mysterious and exciting that, in writing, we should be able to freeze and preserve for as long as we want such perishable goods as thought and speech.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:13pm on October 21, 2017We can hardly ever hurt children by putting too much information within their reach.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:12pm on October 21, 2017The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, 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.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:12pm on October 21, 2017Confronted with what we do not know, we try to protect ourselves by saying that it is not worth knowing.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:11pm on October 21, 2017It 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.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:11pm on October 21, 2017Bill Hull once said to me, “Who needs the most practice talking in school? Who gets the most?” Exactly. The children need it, the teacher gets it.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:11pm on October 21, 2017Most 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.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:10pm on October 21, 2017When we see a chair in a room, we can easily imagine that chair in another part of the room, or in another room, or by itself. But for the baby the chair is an integral part of the room he sees.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:10pm on October 21, 2017A child doesn’t work that way. He is used to getting his answers out of the noise. He has, after all, grown up in a strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make sense of a tiny part of what he experiences.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:10pm on October 21, 2017She showed that very little children could easily be taught to move, not just exuberantly, but also deftly, precisely, gently.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:09pm on October 21, 2017It is probably a mistake, anyway, to assume that whatever little children touch they will destroy, and that we must therefore keep them from touching anything that is not theirs. This dampens their curiosity and confidence.
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:09pm on October 21, 2017A 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. Why can’t we make more use of this great drive for understanding and competence?
How Children Learn by John Holt 3:09pm on October 21, 2017