mekin > mekin's Quotes

“Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meeting
by a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book — mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.

But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when others
are sitting in judgment on them.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“Of all I saw and learned this past half year, one thing stands out. What goes
on in the class is not what teachers think-- certainly not what I had always
thought. For years now I have worked with a picture in mind of what my
class was like. This reality, which I felt I knew, was partly physical, partly
mental or spiritual. In other words, I thought I knew, in general, what the
students were doing, and also what they were thinking and feeling. I see now
that my picture of reality was almost wholly false. Why didn’t I see this
before?”
― John Holt, How Children Fail