How Children Learn (50th anniversary edition) (A Merloyd Lawrence Book)

by John C. Holt

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.

Only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged. They use their minds, not to learn, but to get out of doing the things we tell them to do—to make them learn.

It is probably a mistake, anyway, to assume that whatever little children touch they will destroy, and that we must therefore keep them from touching anything that is not theirs. This dampens their curiosity and confidence. More than that, it probably makes them too fiercely possessive of what is their own. We should try instead, I think, to teach that respecting property does not mean never touching what is not yours, but means treating objects carefully, using them as they are meant to be used, and putting them back where they belong.

Children are perfectly able to learn these things; they are less clumsy and destructive than we suppose. And it is only by handling and using objects that children can learn the right way to handle them.

Children don’t mind letting us adults win the game, as long as we let them score a few points.

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.

What puzzles me is why six-year-olds should be so much more bothered by this kind of confusion and paradox than this baby. She hears things all day long that make no sense, but she doesn’t appear to mind. She lives and moves in uncertainty as naturally and easily as a fish moves in water. When, and why, do children begin to crave certainty?

Children, particularly little ones, are very sensitive to emotion. They not only catch everything we feel, they blow it up to larger-than-life size.

they began their cure, and first began to establish some faint communication with their terribly withdrawn child, by making a point, for hours at a time if need be, of imitating everything he did. This was the door or path by which they led him or persuaded him to come back into the everyday world.

What we have to do is draw back, take off the pressure, reassure them, console them, give them time to regain—as in time they will—enough energy and courage to go back to the task.

We are not likely to get good games by planning them far in advance, but we probably will get them if we play with children just for the fun of it. And whatever the game is, we must be ready to give it up, instantly and without regret, if the child is not enjoying it.

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.

Like most children, he is eager to learn to do things the right way.

If, in our eagerness to teach and help them, we send them enough of these messages of doubt and distrust, we may soon destroy most of all of their confidence in their ability to learn for themselves, and convince them that they really are too lazy, incurious, and stupid to learn.

One of the many great advantages of home-based education is that children not shut up in school have a chance to see their parents and other adults work, and if they wish, as many do, to join in.

They have to pile up quite a mass of raw sensory data before they begin trying to sort it out and make sense of it.

much of the time infants are not trying to “imitate sounds” at all, but are actually trying to speak, that is, to use sounds to convey wishes, feelings, and meanings.

If we want to help little children as they learn to talk, one way to do it is by talking to them—provided we do it naturally and unaffectedly—and by letting them be around when we talk to other people.

“But if he knows, he can’t be wrong! Thinking’s sometimes wrong, but knowing’s always right!”

Nobody fretted about the missing sounds. As a result, the little boy spoke confidently and freely, and before long was able to speak like everyone else.

For the same reason, a question to the wise, if it is a probing question, a quiz, and not a true request for information, is often just as infuriating, because it implies, insultingly, that the person quizzed doesn’t know the answer.

Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children.

Parents who do everything well may not always be good examples for their children; sometimes such children feel, since they can never hope to be as good as their parents, that there is no use in even trying.

Confronted with what we do not know, we try to protect ourselves by saying that it is not worth knowing.

Before these children could begin to think about what particular letters and groups of letters said, they had to get familiar with the look of letters in general, just as a child learning to talk must first become familiar with the sound of talk.

But children are not railroad trains. They don’t learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.

Being always seekers of meaning, children may first go to the hard things, which have more meaning—are

What makes things easy or hard for our minds has very little to do with how little or how much information they may contain, and everything to do with how interesting they are and, to say it once again, how much sense they make, how connected they seem to reality.

Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them.

Children trying out new things are like plants putting out little green shoots. We must be careful not to cut them off.

a child who is allowed to return to babyhood for a while when he feels the need of it, to fill up his tank of courage when he feels it run dry, will move ahead into the unknown far faster than we adults could push him.

the test of intelligence was not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.

But if we get the horse in front of the cart where it belongs, if we get children to do things that require them to find and make use of otherwise dull and useless facts, they learn these facts very rapidly—like

If we merely substitute Isometric Drawing I or Model Building I for Arithmetic I, with the same old business of assignments, homework, drill, and tests, we will have gained little, and probably nothing.

But we hadn’t, and they didn’t, for just this reason, that it was our problem they were working on, not theirs.

let children have a period of completely free play with the materials, before asking them to do directed work with them.

They need time to build up in their minds, without hurry, without pressure, a sense of what words look like, before they start trying to memorize particular words.

We teachers like to think that we can transplant our own mental models into the minds of children by means of explanations. It can’t be done.

When the mind is evolving the abstractions which will lead to physical comprehension, all of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand.

Children use fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world.

Even when the facts seem to support our reasoning, we must, like Einstein, not assume that we have found the final truth.

But the only way children can learn to get meaning out of symbols, to turn other people’s symbols into a kind of reality or a mental model of reality, is by learning first to turn their own reality into symbols.