How Children Learn (50th anniversary edition)

Note: In 1983, John Holt added a number of new observations about children's ways of learning to the original edition of his book. These passages are indented, with an icon at the beginning and one at the end .

Foreword by Deborah Meier

When John Holt's first book, How Children Fail, came out, my own children were just starting at a Chicago public school across the street—and I was picking up a few dollars by subbing in South Side elementary schools. Those of us teaching at the time in so-called "ghetto schools" were taught to fill children's minds since their families and communities were seen to be bereft of useful learning. The children, it was said, did not "know" enough or have enough language to express curiosity.

Being intensely political, I approached my part-time subbing more as an anthropologist seeing how the "other half" lived, and also as an anxious mother whose children would be attending such schools. Holt's book came as a shock, a blessed one that more closely corresponded with what I observed in my racially mixed neighborhood and in the backyards where the children played with their neighbors.

How Children Fail also opened my eyes to something else, something fascinating—to the ways in which even "good" schools teaching middle and upper-middle class children failed them. I recognized myself—the product of a progressive NYC independent school—in the stories he told about the "enlightened" classrooms he observed. Holt showed the ways most schools "foster bad strategies, raise children's fears, produce learning which is usually fragmentary, distorted, and short-lived, and generally fail to meet the real needs of children." His empathy and insights grabbed my attention and lit a small fire that, as time passed, became a passion for me—and for a whole generation of young teachers—not only to change the world but also to get to the bottom of how we humans learn.

As if to feed the yearnings of our generation, Holt soon came out with a book to answer that question. His goal for How Children Learn, he said, was to "describe children—and in a few cases adults—using their minds well, learning boldly and effectively.… Children have a style of learning that fits their condition and which they use naturally and well until we train them out of it." I began to watch my own children in new ways—catching them in the act of learning all sorts of complex things, from learning to swim, to learning to read, and to making sense of the hierarchy on our block of row houses.

Putting John's ideas into practice absorbed the next half century of my life. I always returned to his work to remind me of what we all shared: the fears that make learning harder and limit the intelligence of almost all of us.

The lucid writing and stories that fill How Children Learn were a delight, and I pestered all my friends and colleagues by reading sections aloud. "You have to hear this!":

"Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children."

"Keeping [children's] curiosity 'well supplied with food' doesn't mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves. It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food—like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (as if we can imagine such a thing)."

Holt's insights quickly lead readers to notice so many other "acts" of learning in the adult world as well, and how fearful we still are of being seen as "stupid" or "ignorant" and all the techniques we develop to hide it from others—and at times even from ourselves. I made it a rule: never say "obviously!" I saw the "teacherly" moments in a new light, and tried to avoid them.

While following Holt's deep exploration of how children learn I therefore wasn't surprised to discover Holt had joined "the enemy"—homeschoolers. His little magazine, Growing Without Schooling, was the most useful guide a teacher could ever read. As time passed I began to change my views of homeschooling. I'm still first and foremost working to preserve public education but homeschoolers can be our allies in devising what truly powerful schooling could be like. If we saw the child as an insatiable nonstop learner, we would create schools that made it as easy and natural to do so as it was for most of us before we first entered the schoolroom. Our task is to make schools ready for kids to learn in, not kids ready for schools.

We have a long way to go to make John Holt's dream available to all children. But his books make it possible and easier for many of us to join him in the journey.

Preface

How Children Fail described children using their minds badly. This book tries to describe children—in a few cases, adults—using their minds well, learning boldly and effectively. Some of the children described are in school; most are not yet old enough. It is before they get to school that children are likely to do their best learning. Many experts agree that this is so, though they differ about the reason. I believe, and try to show here, that in most situations our minds work best when we use them in a certain way, and that young children tend to learn better than grownups (and better than they themselves will when they are older) because they use their minds in a special way. In short, children have a style of learning that fits their condition, and which they use naturally and well until we train them out of it. We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves.

What are the results? Only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged. They use their minds, not to learn, but to get out of doing the things we tell them to do—to make them learn. In the short run, these strategies seem to work. They make it possible for many children to get through their schooling even though they learn very little. But in the long run, these strategies are self-limiting and self-defeating, and destroy both character and intelligence. The children who use such strategies are prevented by them from growing into more than limited versions of the human beings they might have become. This is the real failure that takes place in school; hardly any children escape.

When we better understand the ways, conditions, and spirit in which children do their best learning, and are able to make school into a place where they can use and improve the style of thinking and learning natural to them, we may be able to prevent much of this failure. School may then become a place in which all children grow, not just in size, not even in knowledge, but in curiosity, courage, confidence, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, patience, competence, and understanding. To find how best to do this will take us a long time. We may find, in fifty or a hundred years, that all of what we think of as our most up-to-date notions about schools, teaching, and learning are either completely inadequate or outright mistaken. But we will make a big step forward if, by understanding children better, we can undo some of the harm we are now doing.

This book is more concerned with describing effective learning than explaining it, or giving a theory about it. In many places people are busy trying to find out what goes on in the brain, electrically, chemically, and otherwise, when we think and learn. Such research is interesting and may prove to be useful, but it has nothing to do with the aims of this book. We do not need to learn more about the brain, as an organ, in order to make schools better. We could make them a great deal better, knowing no more about the brain than most people know right now. Thus it is interesting that people should be finding evidence that experiences are stored in the brain, in the shape of complicated molecules, like file cards stored in a file. What teachers and learners need to know is what we have known for some time: first, that vivid, vital, pleasurable experiences are the easiest to remember, and secondly, that memory works best when unforced, that it is not a mule that can be made to walk by beating it. It is interesting to read Wolfgang Kohler's theory, perhaps now held by many others, that electrical fields are set up in the brain when we perceive, think, and feel. This would certainly account for the fact that we think badly, and even perceive badly, or not at all, when we are anxious and afraid. But we don't need the explanation to know that the fact is a fact, and to learn from it that when we make children afraid we stop their learning dead in its tracks.

This book is more about children than about child psychology. I hope those who read it will come to feel, or feel more than when they opened it, that children are interesting and worth looking at. I hope that when they look they will notice many things they never noticed before, and in these find much food for thought. I want to whet their curiosity and sharpen their vision, even more than to add to their understanding; to make them skeptical of old dogmas, rather than give them new ones.

The human mind, after all, is a mystery, and, in large part, will probably always be so. It takes even the most thoughtful, honest, and introspective person many years to learn even a small part of what goes on in his own mind. How, then, can we be sure about what goes on in the mind of another? Yet many people talk as if we could measure and list the contents of another person's mind as easily, accurately, and fully as the contents of a suitcase. This is not to say that we ought not to try to understand more about other people's minds and thoughts, but only that we must be very modest and tentative about what we think we have found out.

There's an old story about two men on a train. One of them, seeing some naked-looking sheep in a field, said, "Those sheep have just been sheared." The other looked a moment longer, and then said, "They seem to be—on this side." It is in such a cautious spirit that we should say whatever we have to say about the workings of the mind, and it is in this spirit that I have tried to write, and in which I hope others will read, this book.