John Holt Quotes

#1. 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.

John Holt

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

John Holt

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

John Holt

#4. 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

#5. one reason why schooling is so seldom helpful to children, and almost always deeply harmful, is that they have no reality of encounter with their teachers. The teachers are not themselves, but players of roles. They

John Holt

#6. Since we can't know what knowledge will be 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

#7. 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.

John Holt

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

John Holt

#9. 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.

John Holt

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

John Holt

#11. 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.

John Holt

#12. 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.

John Holt

#13. 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 Holt

#14. The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.

John Holt

#15. 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.

John Holt

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

John Holt

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

John Holt

#18. 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

John Holt

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

John Holt

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

John Holt

#21. 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.

John Holt

#22. No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.

John Holt

#23. 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.

John Holt

#24. 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?

John Holt

#25. 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

John Holt

#26. 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.

John Holt

#27. 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.

John Holt

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

John Holt

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

John Holt

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

John Holt