Then she said thoughtfully, "You know, kids really like to learn; we just don't like being pushed around. No, they don't; and we should be grateful for that. So let's stop pushing them around, and give them a chance. Since I wrote this, I have stopped believing that "schools," however organized, are the proper, or only, or best places for this.
As I wrote in Instead of Education and Teach Your Own, except in very rare circumstances the idea of special learning places where nothing but learning happens no longer seem to me to make any sense at all. She is hardly ever idle.
Most of her waking time she is intensely and purposefully active, soaking up experience and trying to make sense out of it, trying to find how things around her behave, and trying to make them behave as she wants them to. Children who undertake to do things…do not think in terms of success and failure but of effort and adventure. It is only when pleasing adults becomes important that the sharp line between success and failure appears.
In the face of what looks like unbroken failure, she is so persistent. But she goes right on, not the least daunted. A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame, disgrace, a crime. Unlike her elders, she is not concerned with protecting herself against everything that is not easy and familiar; she reaches out to experience, she embraces life.
The poor thinker dashes madly after an answer; the good thinker takes his time and looks at the problem…. The good thinker can take his time because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. Habits, even bad ones, are immediately functional, not remotely functional.
They are elements in some present structure of experience and cannot survive of themselves once the total structure has been changed. He observed an invited educator demonstrating the Cuisenaire rods to a class of severely retarded children. These rods—of various lengths and colors—can be manipulated in such a way as to exemplify the basic facts of arithmetic. There was no question here of testing, no need even to perform. The usual jollities of breaking the ice were dispensed with.
The demonstrator manipulated the rods and invited the students to do the same. For these retarded children the experience of understanding an increment of real power is unthinkably difficult and precious.
The tongue going round in the mouth, and the hand clawing away at the leg under the table doubled their pace. When the time came to turn the rods over and fill the other empty space, he was almost too excited to pick up the rod he wanted but he got it in. It fits! Many of us were moved to tears by his excitement and joy, and by our realization of the great leap of the mind he had just taken.
But here, as elsewhere, the most rewarding thing is Holt's sensitive understanding of what the children themselves are experiencing. It is a rare teacher indeed who can intuit the whole structure of half-thoughts, guesses, errors, and emotions which block the natural flow of understanding.
Holt's descriptions of these life-dilemmas are wonderfully clear. Most important, they constitute a usable and transmissible wisdom, badly needed today. The fact that this book confines itself largely to the classroom, prompts me to suggest that two other books be read in conjunction with it.
One of these is A. A few of my favorite quotes A few good principles to keep in mind: 1 - Children do not need to be "taught" in order to learn; they will learn a great deal, and probably learn best, without being taught. What this means in the field of numbers and math is simply this: the more we can make it possible for children to see how we use numbers, and to use them as we use them , the better.
Pg The attention of children must be lured, caught, and held, like a shy wild animal that must be coaxed with bait to come close. If the situations, the materials, the problems before a child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation or threats will bring it back.
Pg Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned. Pg There is a special place in heaven where angels sing dirges for children herded off to school each day.
Lamenting the destruction of their infinitely creative capacities as fear of authority, fear of being made fun of, is inculcated deep within their minds.
And which drives them towards the hunt for right answers to please countless adults around them and very far away from truly discovering life and their own selves. This, in a nutshell, is what John Holt's book is about. Its immensely sad to read as he recounts case after case of little kids floundering in the midst of the slave-like circumstances they are thrust into. Tethered to their desks for hours, in perpetual dread of the adults around them, who only seem to be interested in developing a very narrow form of learning.
Made to learn about things that basically just don't matter to them. Things that they just parrot to get through the tests.
Or to escape adult disapproval. Sad, anger-inducing and such an immense wastage of time. School really is the place where we destroy life, destroy everything joyful and beautiful that exists in it, and our capacities to experience it all.
Brilliant book. Wish I could lay my hands on more of John Holt's stuff. Jan Martinek. Just some quotes in place of a review. The book is rich in its specificity. But the unsuccessful kids were not trying, however badly, to do the same things as the successful. They were doing something altogether different. They saw the school and their task in it differently. It was a place of danger, and their task was, as far as they could, to stay out of danger.
Their business was not learning, but escaping.
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