Tag Archives: John Holt

How Children Learn by John Holt

American Literature 3 Comments

Synopsis: John Holt’s diary of classroom observations. Review: How Children Learn is far too dense for me to critically analyze. Suffice to say I am really enamored of his respect for children, and inspired by his philosophies on facilitating learning. The closing paragraph of the book sums it up: In my mind’s ear I can hear the anxious voices of a hundred teachers asking me, “How can you tell, how can you be sure what the children are learning, or even that they are learning…

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How Children Fail by John Holt

American Literature 4 Comments

Synopsis: The journals of a teacher reveal how the mistakes that children make reveal a lot about how they are failing to learn–and how schools are failing to teach. Review: How Children Fail was riveting reading. I loved how John Holt paid attention to the kids he encountered so that he could help them learn. He came to realize that teachers were seeking to impose structural forms on the minds of children, where children are best served by being led to develop those forms for…

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John Holt on Learning to Read

American Literature 4 Comments

From Learning All the Time: There are two diametrically opposite ways of opening to children the world of books. One was is to start them with the names and sounds of individual letters, then with small words, then with small groups of these words joined to make small sentences, then with small reading books, and then other books, each a little harder than the one before, until the children supposedly have enough reading skills to read any book they want. The trouble is that by…

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