Learning All The Time

by John C. Holt

the discipline, of caring for one's health has become the product of "medical cue," and the activity of inquiring into the world has become the product of "science," a specialized thing presumably done only by people with billions of dollars of complicated apparatus. But health is not a product and science is something you and I do every day of our lives. In fact, the word science is synonymous with the word learning.

are. The idea, the very idea that we can teach small children how to learn has come to me to seem utterly absurd.

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn, in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools that we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they

do, answering their questions - if they have any and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.

what we need to know to help children learn is not obscure, technical, or complicated, and the materials we can use to help them lie ready at hand all around us.