How Children Learn (Classics in Child Development)

by John C. Holt

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.

Babies were still seen mostly as blobs, waiting for time to begin to turn them into people worthy of serious attention.

Scientific interference is the most destructive interference. Only a scientist knows how to interfere most destructively. Love reveals

In The Facts of Life Laing quotes a distraught woman as asking the head of her philosophy department, “If I do not feel I exist, why should I not kill myself?” By “exist” she meant, of course, exist as something other and more than a machine. Her question was dismissed as trivial. But it is the farthest thing in the world from trivial. If we do not feel that we exist and that our existence is somehow important, why indeed should we not kill ourselves—and everyone else, and all unborn generations as well—which we seem to be getting ready to do. To return for

Because it prevents ordinary human beings from being the scientists, the askers of questions and seekers and makers of answers that we naturally and rightfully are, and makes us instead into science consumers and science worshipers.

The work of Carl Orff and others who have used his method of instruction suggests that when children are given many opportunities to improvise, to make up their own chants, rhythms, and tunes, their musical and verbal growth can be very rapid.

They are simply singing, and letting whatever comes out, come out. We ought to encourage them in this, and do more of it ourselves.

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.

own. We should try instead, I think, to teach that respecting property does not mean never touching what

is not yours, but means treating objects carefully, using them as they are meant to be used, and putting them back where they belong.

The spirit behind such games should be a spirit of joy, foolishness, exuberance, like the spirit behind all good games, including the game of trying to find out how the world works, which we call education.

Very young children seem to have what could be called an

Instinct of Workmanship. We tend not to see it, because they are unskillful and their materials crude. But watch the loving care with which a little child smooths off a sand cake, or pats and shapes a mud pie. They want to make it as well as they can, not to please someone else but to satisfy

thems...

A part of her curiosity about the world and her trust in it has been shut off. Who can tell when it will turn on again?

Children, particularly little ones, are very sensitive to emotion. They not only catch everything we feel, they blow it up

to larger-than-life size.

When people are down, it’s useless to push them or urge them on; that just frightens and discourages them more. What we have to do is draw back, take off the pressure, reassure them, console them, give them time to regain—as in time they will—enough energy and courage to go back to the task.

He is the most noticing, thoughtful, quick little boy and he hates to be taught He loves to learn things and stores up all sorts of facts for future use.

people who teach their children at home, telling (often sadly) about their own little children furiously rejecting their well-meant and loving efforts to help or teach them. Children resist, almost always angrily, all such unasked-for teaching because they hear in it the (perhaps unconscious) message, “You’re not smart enough to see that this is important to learn, and even if you were, you’re not smart enough to learn it.” Naturally it makes them hurt and angry.

One of the many great advantages of home-based education is that children not shut up in school have a chance to see their parents and other adults work, and if they wish, as many do, to join in.

This may be one of the things that makes two-year-olds so touchy—they have just discovered that among all the other things they don’t know how to do, they don’t know how to talk. They are bursting with things to say, needs, and

Bill Hull once said to me, “If we taught children to speak, they’d never learn.”

This is particularly true of children just learning to read. They have a lot of very tentative hunches about the connections between the look of printed letters and the sounds of spoken words. If we give them enough time, they will gradually, as they read for pleasure, test and confirm and strengthen these hunches, and make them a part of what they really know. But if we put too much pressure on these hunches, by continually asking children questions about what this or that letter says, we are liable to jar these hunches loose altogether and convince the children that they don’t know anything, can’t figure out anything, and must depend on us for all their information.

and we cannot learn anything important about other people until they trust us—

We tend to picture a Bad Habit as a kind of sinister creature, like a leech or a vampire bat, just waiting to fasten onto us. Smoke once, goes the warning, and you’ll always smoke; read or spell a word wrongly once, and you’ll do it forever. It’s not true.

“You’re not smart enough to know that you should know this, and not smart enough to learn it.”

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.

up to me with a book

By such means these adults destroyed most of the

confidence and intelligence of that child. Perhaps by now he really is “learning disabled.” But they and their incessant anxious testing surely did a lot to disable him.

As I pointed out in How Children Fail, the children who always forget things in school may not forget so much because their memories are bad as because they never dare trust their memories. Even when they are right, they still feel wrong.

One of the most important things teachers can do for any learner is to make the learner less and less dependent on them. We need to give students ways to find out for themselves whether what they have done is correct and makes sense.

There’s nothing wrong with telling a child, if we don’t like a book or get tired of reading it, that we don’t want to read it. He will enjoy our reading more if we read something that we like, as well as he.

As a matter of fact, since we will probably be asked to read aloud any book that we get for a child, we would do well to make sure that we like most of these before we get them.

I mean, like them enough so that we will be glad to read them not once or twice but many times.

But if parents read aloud to children only so that children will learn to read, the whole thing will be spoiled.

The only good reason for reading aloud is the joy of sharing with children a story you love.

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.

But of course he didn’t have to spend hours a day being taught reading skills and being tested to be sure he had learned them. He could use that time to read.

Timetables! We act as if children were railroad trains running on a schedule.

But children are not railroad trains.

They don’t learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.

I would now say “all of the time.” Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how.

To be sure, it can’t be done overnight; but it certainly doesn’t deserve all the worry and agony that we put into it. All we accomplish, by our worrying, simplifying,

and teaching, is to make reading a hundred times harder for

children than it ...

I see now that Tommy’s first sign making has the same

relationship to writing English as an infant’s first babbling has to speaking English.

Children trying out new things are like plants putting out little green shoots. We must be careful not to cut them off.