Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process...the independent scientist in the child disappears.
-John Holt
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People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.
-John Holt
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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.
-John Holt
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The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure... severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied.
-John Holt
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The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.
-John Holt
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Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
~John Holt
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-John Holt
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John Caldwell Holt (April 14, 1923-September 14, 1985) was an American author and educator, and a pioneer in youth rights theory. At the urging of his sister, Holt became a fifth grade teacher. After several years of teaching in Colorado he moved to Boston where he met fellow teacher Bill Hull, and they decided to start a classroom observation project; one would teach, while the other would watch.
The notes and journal entries Holt accumulated during his first eleven years of teaching formed the core of two of his most popular books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, as well as his less-known and more radical work, Escape from Childhood: The Rights and Needs of Children. These three books detailed the foundational ideas of Holt's philosophy of education. He held that the primary reason children did not learn in schools was fear: fear of getting the wrong answers, fear of being mocked by the teacher and classmates, fear of not being good enough. This was worsened, he maintained, by children being forced to study things that they were not necessarily interested in.
The above information was taken from the Holt article on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, based on the GNU Free Documentation License.
Links:
Growing Without Schooling a website dedicated to the writings of John Holt
Book excerpt: Common Objections to Homeschooling by John Holt
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Resources:
Learning All The Time
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