How Children Learn

by John C. Holt

It is before they get to school that children are likely to do their best learning. Many experts agree that this is so, though they differ about the reason. I believe, and try to show here, that in most situations our minds work best when we use them in a certain way, and that young children tend to learn better than grownups (and better than they themselves will when they are older) because they use their minds in a special way.

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.

When we better understand the ways, conditions, and spirit in which children do their best learning, and are able to make school into a place where they can use and improve the style of thinking and learning natural to them, we may be able to prevent much of this failure.

Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating

children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.”

In any case, I no longer believe we can make schools into places in which all children grow in the ways described above. An exception might be a few very specific kinds of schools, like schools of the dance, or computer programming, or flying. But on the whole I don’t think children with any range of real choices in the world are going to want to spend much time in places where nothing but learning happens, and where the only adults they meet are child specialists whose job it is to watch them and make them do things.

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.

when we make children afraid we stop their learning dead in its tracks.

But it would be simple-minded and silly to say that all the complicated varieties of thought, of mental experience, can be neatly separated

into two kinds and that one of these can be exclusively assigned to the left side of the brain, the other to the right.

Making judgments about how the mind or the brain (they’re not the same) works on the basis of a few (or even sixty-four) squiggles on a chart is like deciding what lives in the ocean by lowering

and then pulling up a five-gallon bucket and seeing what you can find in it. Nor is the situation much improved by using bigger buckets. You won’t find out that way. Learning about the mind is a lot more like learning about the ocean than figuring out how to start a car. The only way we will ever learn much about it—and even this will be highly incomplete and uncertain—will be to dive, swim about, and see what we can see in the deep waters of our own thoughts.

It is only in the presence of loving, respectful, trusting adults like Millicent Shinn or Glenda Bissex that children will learn all they are capable of learning, or reveal to us what they are learning. The tinkerers, dissectors, and manipulators will only drive children into artificial behavior, if not actual deception, evasion, and retreat. It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.

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?

How exciting it must be for a child, playing a game with an adult, to feel that by doing a certain thing, he can make that omnipotent giant do something, and that he can keep this up as long as he likes.