How Children Fail, John Holt -

Holt was both a teacher and a classroom observer in the USA in the late 1950's. The book is mostly a collection of his notes. He organizes his notes into four parts: Strategy, Fear and Failure, Real Learning, and How Schools Fail. The first part describes how children (around the 5th grade level) learn to give teachers the answers they want with the least effort and pain. Holt sounds at times a bit judgmental of the children but overall seems to realize that it is primarily the system that creates the children's behavior.

Note: my comments are in brackets []

Introduction

"The basic quality of our emotional maturity, we now realize, is largely the result of the relationship between parent and child." p 11(Allan Fromme, Ph. D.)

Fromme says we know very little about the interaction between the teacher and child and about the influences they have on one another. He asks: What does the child hear when he is called upon? What does he feel?..... What does the teacher think and feel and do as he awaits the answer? Does he understand the meaning of the child's answer or see it merely as right or wrong?" p 12

"Does his relationship with the child have the intimacy ideally needed for intellectual growth or is it a dull, contractual one which fosters non-learning as much as it does learning?"

Fromme says in effect that teachers must have the sensitivity to perceive many aspects of the child's needs. He says that without such a sensitivity teachers can be "no more successful in the classroom than in their marriages."

He says we "cannot legislate sensitivity and intimacy into existence." [But I would say we can legislate it out of existence.] He also says we cannot "command perception." p 13

So what we must do instead, he say is give "specific, concrete examples" which help the teacher "see" the child [most importantly his feelings & the younger the child, the more important the feelings]

He says instead of teaching [encouraging, supporting, fostering] things like curiosity [and cooperation, independence, responsibility, empathy, love of learning] "the subject matter becomes an end in itself."

[End of into]

p. 15

John Holt starts the foreword to the book with "Most children in school fail."

He says not only do many fail academically, but more fail because they"

"...fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives.

"Why do they fail?

"They fail because they are afraid, bored and confused. p 16

"They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults all around them...

"They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities and talents.

He says they are confused because most of what they hear makes little sense. And because "it often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know--to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds."

Part 1 - Strategy

"When I started teaching I thought some people were just born smarter than others and that not much could be done about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It isn't hard to believe if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or in the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl who under some circumstances is witty, observant, analytical, imaginative, in a word, intelligent, come into the classroom, and as if by magic, turn into a complete idiot?

The worst student we had, the worst student I have ever encountered, was in his life outside the classroom, as mature, intelligent and interesting a student as anyone at school. What went wrong? Experts muttered to his parents about brain damage-- a handy way to end a mystery that you can't explain otherwise. Somewhere along the line his intelligence became disconnected from his schooling. Where? Why?" p 25-26