How Children Learn (Classics in Child Development)

by John C. Holt

We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves.

Children first going to school do a lot of singing, to be sure; but they all sing the same songs, taught and led by the teacher, and the aim is to get them “right,” not to make up something new.

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.

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. Why can’t we make more use of this great drive for understanding and competence? Surely we can find more ways to let children see people using some of the skills we want them to acquire—though this will be difficult when in fact those skills, like many of the “essential” skills of arithmetic, are not really used to do anything. Who, in real life, divides one fraction by another? Meanwhile, at home, we should try to keep out of reach, and even out of sight, valuable or dangerous objects that we don’t want children to touch. At the same time, we should keep on hand a good many objects cheap and durable enough so that a child can touch them and use them; we shouldn’t have to worry if they get broken. Maybe certain ordinary household objects would be good presents for small children: an eggbeater, a saucepan, a flashlight. After all, it doesn’t make much sense, in a family that will later spend tens of thousands of dollars on the child’s education, to get upset, and to upset him because he or she may ruin something worth twenty-five cents.

good idea

Watching her do this, I was struck by two things. First, she did not feel that she had to get everything right before she started to do anything. She was willing—no, more than willing, eager—to begin by doing something, and then think about fixing it up. Secondly, she was not satisfied with incorrect imitations, but kept on looking and comparing until she was satisfied that she was correct—which she almost always was.

The spirit of these games is everything. The only good reason for playing games with babies is because we love them, and delight in playing these games with them and in sharing their delight in playing—not because we want someday to get them into college. It is our delight in the baby and the games that make the games fun, and worthwhile and useful for the baby. Take away the delight, and put in its place some cold-hearted calculation about future I.Q. and SAT scores, and we kill the game, for ourselves and the baby. If we go on for long in this spirit the babies will soon refuse to play—or if they do, play only in the spirit of school, i.e., because they think we’ll be disappointed or angry if they don’t.

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