Learning All The Time

by John C. Holt

Learning to read is easy, and most children will do it more quickly and better and with more pleasure if they can do it themselves, untaught, untested, and helped only when and if they ask for help.

What children need to get ready for reading is exposure to a lot of print. Not pictures, but print. They need to bathe their eyes in print, as when smaller they bathe their ears in talk.

This is my objection to books about "Teach Your Baby This" and "Teach Your Baby That." They are very likely to destroy children's belief that they can find things out for themselves, and to make them think instead that they can only find things out from others.

A dictionary, in other words, is a collection

of people's opinions about what words mean, as other people use them.

What is important is that children should enjoy their reading enough to want to read more. The other thing that is important is that they should become better and better at getting meaning from context, for that is the supreme skill of a good reader. The trouble with telling children what words mean, or asking them to ask the dictionary to tell them, is that they don't get a chance to figure out the meaning of the word. Figuring out what you don't know or aren't sure of is the greatest intellectual skill of all.

We can say either word quickly or slowly; make either vowel sound as long or short as we wish.

After all, that's why we call dogs "dogs"; there is no particular sense to it, it's just that we've been doing it that way for a long time.

(1) written letters stand for spoken sounds; (2) the order of the letters on the page, from our left to our right, corresponds to the order in time of the spoken sounds.

does not say "buh," nor d "duh." Big does not say "buh-ig," nor rub "ruh-buh."

These letters don't make any sound, except perhaps the fain- test puff of air, except when they are combined with a vowel in a word or syllable. Therefore, it is misleading and absurd, as well as false, to try to teach them in isolation.

All we have to do then is to expose children to the two basic ideas of phonics: that written letters stand for and "make" spoken sounds, and that the order of the written letters matches the order of the spoken sounds.

A better variation of that game might go like this. We could write each letter on a separate card or piece of paper, vowels in one color, and consonants in another. Then we could say to the child, "Put together any two, or three, or four (or more) of these cards, and I will tell you what they say." If the child gave us bsrx, we could do our best to make those sounds. The child would begin to notice after a while that the only combinations of letters that made sounds that sounded

like the words he heard around him were the ones that had both colors in them, and that these were very often in the form of consonant- color + vowel-color + consonant-color. If he ever asked, "What do you call this kind of letter, and what do you call this kind?" (I can't guess whether a child would be likely to do this), I would say, "We call these kinds of letters 'vowels' and these consonants."' (If he asked why, I would tell him I didn't know.)

The moral of the story is twofold: that young people want, need, and like to read books that have meaning for them, and that when such books

are put within easy reach they will sooner or later figure out, without being taught and with only minimal outside help, how to read them. In

any teaching that the learner has not asked for is likely to impede and prevent his or her learning.

What we must do in helping anyone learn to read is to make very clear that writing is an extension of speech, that beyond every written word there is a human voice speaking, and that reading is the way to hear what those voices are saying.

We should constantly remind them that they figured out for themselves how to understand and talk like all the bigger people around them, and that learning to write and to read writing is easy

since children sense their littleness and want to be larger and more potent, the idea that through writing they can make their voices I reach much farther could be very exciting to them.

Children Learning to speak do not learn to say one short word or phrase perfectly, then another word of phrase, and so on. They say a great many things, as many as

they can, and with much use and practice learn to say them better and better. In their learning they advance not on a narrow front but on a very broad one, working on many different things at once.

Since then I have seen in many other families that it is very hard to keep young children in bed if a group of adults is having lively conversation not too far away. The children will find a hundred different reasons for coming to check out what the grown-ups are doing.

What adults can do for children is to make more and more of that world and the people in it accessible and transparent to them. The key word is access: to people, places, experiences, the places where we work, other places we go--cities, countries, streets, buildings. We can also make available tools, books, records, toys, and other resources.

On the whole, kids are more interested in the things that adults really

use than in the little things we buy especially for them. I mean, anyone who has seen little kids in the kitchen knows that they would rather play with the pots and pans than anything made...

Anytime that, without being invited, without being asked, we try to teach somebody else something, any- time we do that, we

convey to that person, whether we know it or not, a double message. The first part of the message is: I am teaching you something important, but you're not smart enough to sec how important it is. Unless I teach it to you, you'd probably never bother to find out. The second message that uninvited teaching conveys to the other person is: What I'm teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn't teach it to you, you couldn't learn it.

Adults must use the skills they have where children can see them. In the unlikely event that they have no skills to speak of, they should learn some, and let the children see them learning, even if only as simple a thing as touch typing. They should invite children to join them in using these skills. In this way children can be slowly drawn, at higher and higher levels of energy, commitment, and skill, into more and more serious and worthwhile

adult activities. When parents

When I wrote How Children Fail, it was only after months of observing and keeping careful notes that I was able to see underlying patterns of self-defeating behavior that the fifth-graders in my class had learned to conceal.

do it;

In my mind's eye I can also see a little right-left reminder-a little rug, or piece of heavy cloth, or wood, or even cardboard, with an outline of the child's two bare feet, side by side, the right foot marked R, and the left L. When the child stands on it, with his feet pointed the same way, he can then tell which is which.

Mistakes When children first le...

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(1) Courtesy: if a distinguished person from a foreign country were visiting you, you would not correct every mistake he made in English, however much he might want to learn the Language, because it would be rude. We do not think of rudeness or courtesy as being applicable to our dealings with very little children. But they are.

(4) It is always, without exception, better for a child to figure out something on his own than to be told-- provided, of course, as

in the matter of running across the street, that his life is not endangered in the Learning. But in matters intellectual, I admit no exception to this rule. In the first place, what he figures out, he remembers better. In the second place, and far more important, every time he figures something out, he gains confidence in his ability to figure things out.

(5) We are fooling ourselves if we think that by being nice about it we can prevent corrections from sounding like reproofs. It is only in exceptional circumstances and with the greatest tact that you can correct an adult without to some degree hurting...

of identify or ego or self-esteem is so much weaker, can accept correction equably? I would say that in ninetynine cases out of a hundred, any child will take correction as a kind of reproof and this no matter how enthusia...

"A word to the wise," he said, "is infuriating."

say, "People just praised me to get me to do what they wanted."

Babies do not learn in order to please us, but because it's their instinct and nature to want to find out about the world. If we praise them for everything they do, after a while they are going to start learning, doing things, just to please us, and the next step is that they are going to become worried about not pleasing us. They're going to become just as afraid of doing the wrong thing, as they might have been if they had been faced with the threat of

punishment. What children want and need from us is thoughtful attention. They want us to notice them and pay some kind of attention to what they do, to take them seriously, to trust and respect them as human beings. They want courtesy and politeness, but they don't need much praise.

Children are not only philosophers; they are cosmologists, they're inventors of myths, of religions-literally like the Indians who came up with the idea that there was a turtle and the world grew out of his back, or that the gods brought lire.

Living is learning. It is impossible to be alive and conscious (and some would say unconscious) without constantly learning things. If we are alive we are receiving various sorts of messages from our environment all the time. We take these in, in one

form or another and make use of them. We are constantly experiencing reality and in one-way or another incorporating it into our mental model of the universe: the organized sum of what we think we know about everything.

Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are. As a teacher, it took me a Long time to find this out. I was an ingenious and resourceful teacher, clever about thinking up lesson plans and demonstrations and motivating devices and all of that acamaracus. And I only very slowly and painfully-believe me, painfully learned that when I started teaching less, the children started learning more.

Learning is not the product of teaching. The five-word version is: Teaching does not make learning.

Learners make learning. Learners create learning. The reason that this has been forgotten is that the activity of learning has been made into a product called "education," Just as the activity