Learning All The Time

by John C. Holt

He told me that it had taken him many years to stop doing -one at a time all the many things he had been trained to do, and finally to learn that this tiny amount of moral support and help was all that children needed of him, and that anything more was of no help at all.

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.

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

So why do we teach and demand cursive writing in schools? -I have no idea. Pure habit, I guess.

I suspect that many children would learn arithmetic, and learn it better, if it were illegal.

Where N is any prime number, (N - 1)! + 1 is divisible by N

I cannot prove this orally

There seems to he in unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an

A veteran teacher summed it up beautifully: "A word to the wise," he said, "is infuriating."

The problem is that we human beings like teaching. We're a teaching animal, as well as a learning animal. We have to restrain that impulse that habit, that need to explain things to everybody unless we are asked.

Yet I don't like being around people who act and talk as if their mission in life were to educate me, whose relation to me is always that of a teacher to pupil.

Adults have to be conscious of a rise and fall in children--like the rise and fall of die tide--of courage and confidence. Some days kids have a tiger in their tank. They're just raring to go; they're full of enthusiasm and confidence. If you knock them down, they bounce up. Other days, you scratch them and they pour out blood.

Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are.