John Holt Quotes

The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.

Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.

To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.

To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.

If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.

We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.

It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

A child whose life is full of the threat and fear of punishment is locked into babyhood. There is no way for him to grow up, to learn to take responsibility for his life and acts. Most important of all, we should not assume that having to yield to the threat of our superior force is good for the child's character. It is never good for anyone's character.

We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way.

Fear, boredom, and resistance--they all go to make what we call stupid children.

The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.

This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything." It is the creed of a slave.

Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons: they think that raising their children is their business not the government’s; they enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don’t want to give that up to others; they want to keep them from being hurt, mentally, physically, and spiritually.

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.

Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. 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.

A life worth living, and work worth doing - that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called 'a better education.

Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.

Over the years, I have noticed that the child who learns quickly is adventurous. She's ready to run risks. She approaches life with arms outspread. She wants to take it all in. She still has the desire of the very young child to make sense out of things. She's not concerned with concealing her ignorance or protecting herself. She's ready to expose herself to disappointment and defeat. She has a certain confidence. She expects to make sense out of things sooner or later. She has a kind of trust.

Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.

It is not the teacher's proper task to be constantly testing and checking the understanding of the learner. That's the learner's task, and only the learner can do it. The teacher's job is to answer questions when learners ask them, or to try to help learners understand better when they ask for that help.

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

schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat.

I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything, that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts, to have a model of the structure in one's mind. We can give other people names, and lists, but we cannot give them our mental structures; they must build their own.

We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.

When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become "producers " they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is "yes," and that a "no" is defeat.

The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do

The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.

Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives.

By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child’, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good

We who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference, are probably no more than one percent of the population, if that. And we are not likely to become the majority in my lifetime. This doesn't trouble me much anymore, as long as this minority keeps on growing. My work is to help it grow.

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.

Real social change is a process that takes place over time, usually quite a long time. At a given moment in history, 99 percent of a society may think and act one way on a certain matter, and only 1 percent think and act very differently. In time, that 1 percent may become 2 percent, then 5 percent, then 10, 20, 30 percent, until finally it becomes the dominant majority, and social change has taken place.

he said: (1) accept yourself, (2) forget yourself, (3) find something to do and to care about that is more important to you than you are.

The person who really needs to know something does not need to be told many times, drilled, tested. Once is enough.

Someone asked the other day, "Why do we go to school?" Pat, with vigor unusual in her, said, "So when we grow up we won't be stupid." These children equate stupidity with ignorance. Is this what they mean when they call themselves stupid? Is this one of the reasons why they are so ashamed of not knowing something? If so, have we, perhaps un-knowingly, taught them to feel this way? We should clear up this distinction, show them that it is possible to know very few facts, but make very good use of them. Conversely, one can know many facts and still act stupidly. The learned fool is by no means rare in this country.

It's a most serious mistake to think that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life, that people do it best when they are not doing anything else and best of all in places where nothing else is done. p.278

But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it.

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?

Books ... rarely, if ever, talk about what children can make of themselves, about the powers that from the day or moment of birth are present in every child.

We don't have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.

It is not just power, but impotence, that corrupts people. It gives them the mind and soul of slaves. It makes them indifferent, lazy, cynical, irresponsible, and, above all, stupid.

This low-effort syndrome is often seen as a way that adolescents assert their independence from adults, but it is also a way that students with the fixed mindset protect themselves. They view the adults as saying, “Now we will measure you and see what you’ve got.” And they are answering, “No you won’t.” John Holt, the great educator, says that these are the games all human beings play when others are sitting in judgment of them.

A teacher in class is like a man in the woods at night with a powerful flashlight in his hand. Wherever he turns his light, the creatures on whom it shines are aware of it, and do not behave as they do in the dark. Thus the mere fact of his watching their behavior changes it into something very different. Shine where be will, he can never know very much of the night life of the woods.

For a long time I have been interested in my own thoughts, feelings, and motives, eager to know as much as I can of the truth about myself. After many years, I think that at most I may know something about a very small part of what goes on in my own head. How preposterous to imagine that I can know what goes on in someone else's.

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.

We think in terms of getting a skill first, and then finding useful and interesting things to do with it. The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed.

The danger of letting people ask, "Is this the best way to do this job?" is that after a while they may ask, "Is this job worth doing?

Figuring out what you don't know or aren't sure of is the greatest intellectual skill of all.

I have no problem with boredom, or not knowing what to do next. My only problem-which I may never solve--is finding enough time to do all the things I would like to do.

Learning is not the product of teaching.

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.

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn’t a school at all. —JOHN HOLT

I don't wish to give the impression that the cruelty of S-chools is a kind of bad or careless habit of which they might be cured, if people really wanted to cure them. Compulsory and competitive schools are cruel by their very nature.

I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it's all better. - John Leslie

If s-chools, doing places for children, are honest, active, and interesting enough, they will not need to be compulsory; as long as they are compulsory, they don't need to be good, and most of them will not be. To say that schools must be compulsory because someday they might all be good, is to say in effect that they must be compulsory no matter how bad they are. I

If we try to make children fantasize, these fake fantasies, like the ready-made fantasies of TV, will in time drive out most of their true fantasies, the ones that come from their experience in the world and their need to make sense of it and become at home in it.

Since we can’t know what knowledge will be the most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well, that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.” John Holt

The things we know and believe are a part of us. We feel we have always known them. Almost anything else, anything that doesn’t fit into our structure of knowledge, our mental model of reality, is likely to seem strange, wild, fearful, dangerous and impossible. People defend what they are used to even when it is hurting them.

Japanese gardeners, over many centuries, have learned to do things to trees, to clip their roots or trim their branches, to limit their supply of water, air, or sun, so that they live, and for a long time, but only in tiny, shrunken, twisted shapes. Such trees may please us, or they may not. But what could they tell us about the nature of trees? If a tree can be deformed and shrunk, is this, then, its nature? The nature of these trees, given enough of the sun, air, water, soil, and food they need, is to grow like trees, tall and straight. People can be more easily deformed, and worse deformed, even than trees—and more than trees, they feel it, it hurts. But

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self. . . . Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students.

Pravi test karaktera nije koliko znamo napraviti, već kako se ponašamo u situaciji kad nešto ne znamo napraviti.

There are very severe penalties for being a bad student but no penalties at all for being a bad teacher." The

we can trust children to find out about the world, and that when trusted, they do find out.

Fantasy works better when it has something real to work with.

How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task.

Words are not only a clumsy and ambiguous means of communication, they are extraordinarily slow.

We are all afraid of many things; we probably can't help that. What we can try to do is not give in to our fears, but face them down instead. There is excitement in that.

When you're not sure which of two or three methods to use, then try all of them on a simple problem and see which one gives you the answer that you know is right.

In other words, start with what you know, and use a little guesswork, or common sense, or whatever you want to call it, to figure out what you don't know.

There is more real learning in a good picture than in twenty workbooks.

The only thing to do was to turn off the questions and watch - like a child. Take it all in. See everything, worry about nothing.

It is not easy to find out what we like or want, when all our lives other people have been hard at work not just to make us do what they want, but to make us think that we want to do it.

Deny children – or anyone else - the chance to do ‘nothing’, and we may be denying them the chance to do ‘something’ - to find and do any work that is truly important, to themselves or to someone else.

What we do in our lives and our work is greatly infuenced by metaphors-the pictures we have in our minds about how the world works or ought to work. Often these images are more real to us than reality itself.

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher.

We tell children here to think about the meaning of what they are doing. We say this is the sure way to the right answer. But it may lead instead into one of the paradoxes and contradictions of which elementary math is full.

What can those people do who feel as I do about them, but have children stuck in them? On the whole, there seem to me three possibilities: (1) Help the child to cope with S-chool. (2) Help him to escape it. (3) Give him an alternative.

John, if you ever get a family, there’s one thing you should know. No matter how well you get along with your children when they are little, there is going to come a time when they will have no use for you, and you should be ready for it.

No one can say, "Here is Biology, here Mathematics, here Philosophy." No one can point to Physics, or show us Chemistry. In reality no dotted lines divide History from Geography or Physics from Chemistry, or Philosophy from Linguistics, and so on. These

This is my objection to books about "Teach Your Baby This" and "Teach Your Baby That." They are very likely to destroy children's belief that they can find things out for themselves, and to make them think instead that they can only find things out from others.

intellectual activity, begins with someone asking a question. That is, someone wondering, puzzled, confused. S-chool books, textbooks, rarely help us to see this. They tell us right answers, but very rarely the questions that first led people to look for those answers. So

Bármily kelletlenül is vallja be egy mély meggyőződéssel rendelkező ember, hogy véleménye lehet téves, azt tudnia kell, hogy akármennyire igaz is a véleménye, ha nem lehet alaposan, gyakran és félelem nélkül megvitatni, akkor nem élő igazságként, hanem holt dogmaként birtokolja.

The curse of our time, perhaps soon a fatal one, is not idleness, but work not worth doing, done by people who hate it, who do it only because they fear that if they do not they will have no ‘job’, no livelihood, and worse than that, no sense of being useful or needed or worthy.

Incompetence has one other advantage. Not only does it reduce what others expect and demand of you, it reduces what you expect or even hope for yourself. When you set out to fail, one thing is certain-you can't be disappointed. As the old saying goes, you can't fall out of bed when you sleep on the door.

There is no reason why a child, living in every other way as a dependent of his parents, could not and should not have (like everyone else) the right to decide what he wants to learn and when and how much of it he wants to learn in school, and in what school, and how much time he wants to spend doing it.

For the most part, the schools are what they have always been. If anything, they are worse, in many ways and for many reasons. As in the past, they are often mentally and physically cruel to most of the children in them, and most of all to the poor, the nonwhite, the unusual, and the brave and independent

No one can truly say “Yes” to something, be it an experience or another person’s offer of love, if he cannot truly say “No”. No one can wholeheartedly accept and welcome love if he does not have an unquestioned right to refuse it. No one can fully and freely give love if he does not have the unquestioned right to withhold it.

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.

We act as if we thought this tool of language were perfect, and children had only to learn to use it correctly--i.e., as we do. In fact, it is in many ways a most imperfect tool. If we were more aware of its imperfections, of the many ways in which it does not fit the universe it attempts to describe, of the paradoxes and contradictions built into it, then we could warn the children, help them see where words and experience did not fit together,

For a very long time, ever since men formed societies in which some people bossed others, children have fulfilled this very important function. Every adult parent, however lowly or powerless, had at least some one that he could command, threaten, and punish. No man was so poor, even a slave, that he could not have these few slaves of his own. Today, when most “free” men feel like slaves, having their own homegrown slaves is very satisfying. Many could not do without them.

Despite all the talk about the technological demands of modern society, or the great need of education to enable people to meet these demands, the fact is that most modern work is moronic. It needs almost nothing in training, skill, intelligence, or judgment. During World War II we found that even the most highly skilled industrial jobs, jobs that people supposedly had to spend years learning, could be learned from scratch by most people of average intelligence in a few months.

The book will be a demonstration that children, without being coerced or manipulated, or being put in exotic, specially prepared environments, or having their thinking planned and ordered for them, can, will and do pick up from the world around them important information about what we call the Basics. It will also demonstrate that "ordinary" people, without special schooling themselves, can give their children whatever slight assistance may be needed to help them in their exploration of the world, and that to do this requires no more than a little tact, patience, attention and readily available information.

Dr. H. K. Beecher is the name of one of the first serious students of pain in the United States. In 1946, he published an article in the Annals of Surgery titled “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle” (Vol. 123, p. 96). For years it was widely quoted because of its most interesting observation. But now Dr. Beecher is passing into obscurity, for what he had to say is no longer acceptable to students of pain. Dr. Beecher questioned 215 seriously wounded soldiers at various locations in the European theater during World War II shortly after they had been wounded and found that 75 percent of them had so little pain that they had no need for morphine. Reflecting that strong emotion can block pain, Dr. Beecher went on to speculate: “In this connection it is important to consider the position of the soldier: His wound suddenly releases him from an exceedingly dangerous environment, one filled with fatigue, discomfort, anxiety, fear and real danger of death, and gives him a ticket to the safety of the hospital. His troubles are over, or he thinks they are.” This observation is reinforced by a report of the United States surgeon general during World War II, noted in Martin Gilbert’s book The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), that in order to avoid psychiatric breakdown, infantrymen had to be relieved of duty every so often. The report said, “A wound or injury is regarded not as a misfortune, but a blessing.

Why do they do this? Because it gives them a license to act like tyrants and to feel like saints. “Do what I tell you!” roars the tyrant. “It’s for your own good, and one day you’ll be grateful,” says the saint. Few people, feeling themselves powerless in a world turned upside down, can or even wish to resist the temptation to play this benevolent despot.

look at children, patiently, repeatedly, respectfully, and to hold off making theories and judgments about them until they have in their minds what most of them do not now have—a reasonably accurate model of what children are like.

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