John Holt quotes

" The reason of a resolution is more to be considered than the resolution itself. " # Reason

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

" The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. " # Poverty and The Poor # Fear # Love

" The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners. " # Education # Teachers and Teaching # Learning

" 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. " # Knowledge # Love # Education

" 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. " # Ideas # Love # Education

" 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. " # Interest # Children # Love

" 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 " # Intelligence and Intellectuals

" All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. " # Books - Reading # Learning # Children

" The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know. " # Teachers and Teaching # Failure # Fear