John Holt (1)Recensioni

12/6/22

12/6/22

12/6/22

very good, somewhat dated

Grâce au talent de conteur de John Holt, on comprend intimement comment il s'est rendu compte qu'enseigner ne pouvait qu'être inefficace et dommageable, même dans les classes conviviales qu'il avait mises en place : l'école est structurellement inadaptée pour apprendre. La réflexion de John Holt le mènera à sa conception du unschooling. Grâce à des récits précis et pleins de vie issus de son observation de l'apprentissage en cours (ou pas) dans ses classes, on voit comment le penseur majeur du unschooling des années 1970 et 1980 en est arrivé à l'idée qu'au lieu d'écoles alternatives, il valait mieux proposer des alternatives à l'école. De plus en plus de gens cherchent aujourd'hui à se défaire de la vision centrée sur l'école de la société, et c'est stimulant de lire les fondements de la pensée de John Holt. Ce livre sera utile aux parents qui hésitent encore à déscolariser un enfant en souffrance à l'école, ils comprendront pourquoi ce sera mieux pour lui, même si ce choix demande des aménagements familiaux compliqués. Il intéressera ceux qui veulent en savoir plus sur l'histoire de la pédagogie : on assiste en direct à la prise de conscience par Holt de l'impossibilité intrinsèque de la forme scolaire de transmettre quoi que ce soit à un enfant - en dehors de la soumission et de la dévalorisation de sa propre expérience.

I liked this book fairly well. I really appreciated how they did the updated edition. Originally Holt wrote this in the early 80s. For the 21st century update they kept Holt's words exactly as they were with the secondary author addi g his own in snippets clearly shown what was new. Some chapters included mostly new, like that on legal aspects of homeschooling, and some where completely untouched. Most had a paragraph or do of new material.

My only complaint was that I didn't feel live I learned a lot more than I had just having out with unschooled individuals. I was a little taken back by Holt's arguments about there not being learning disabilities, the update only slightly before in saying that things aren't exactly that there aren't but they don't have to be as dibilitating as the public school makes them out to be. Everything else seemed on point so it might just be a matter of semantics.

Probably very good fit those not yet familiar with unschoing/homeschooling with child directed education. Almost 20 years have passed since this update and a new update may be helpful, particularly I would like to see since input on how screen time effects unschooling.

Riveting from the first page to the last, the style is engaging and illuminating. The anecdotes also corroborate my experience and just "feel" right. Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if the establishment has paid any attention to his observations: I know of no government school systems that devote any attention at all to the students other than telling them what & how we want them to absorb and ignoring their innate capacities for learning.

mostly read revisions, reading Holt makes me feel guilty and angry about my own children's education

Holt's first book Is primarily a collection of his notes from his early years at teaching, primarily at the Colorado Mountain School. A private school for rich "progressives."

The copy I read was a later re-issue. It was certainly a different way of doing an updated revision. Normally when I read such its the exact same book with only a few paragraphs re-edited due to some new information, or updated references, since the original publishing. However This one kept the entire original in tact and the added additional commentary where the author had changed his mind since the original publishing, marked as such. I'm not clear if I really liked that or not, but it certainly made for a significantly longer book.

Holt argues that children fail because school is set up in a way that most kids are too afraid to actually learn. They need or want the right answer, but cramming for tests only ensures they don't actually know what they are being taught.

I lot of focus on math and the wildly disconnected "ideas" children have about it.

schools make children fail by making them afraid to try

Pretty interesting book about Holt's experiences in the classroom. I really liked the notebook-esque format as well as the later commentary. As I was thinking about my own frustrations with work at the time, this seemed to also be a useful book about company management.

A few takeaways:
- "children fail because they are afraid, confused, and bored:" this seems like a pretty helpful framework, not only for thinking about the circumstances in which children disengage, but also for thinking about how adults lose motivation.
- the idea of "producers" vs. "thinkers." I see "producer" behavior frequently, even among adults, where people freeze up and stop thinking when they feel pressure to give the right answer. I do think that framing it as behaviors instead of character traits might be more helpful.
- John Holt's journey from "how can I make school work for these kids?" to "School sucks, kids need to learn in self-directed ways" is fascinating to follow.

An eye-opening book on how children learn in their environments and how they learn better and faster outside of schools. A must read for any homeschool family.

Interesting info on how children learn many things without having to be told how. Good for parents, teachers and anyone who works with children.

An excellent explanation why public schools are a failure and why students can't remember anything they supposedly 'learned'.

A useful book that explains easier and cheaper ways of teaching your kids what takes the normal educational system too long and convoluted ways to do. Highly recommended for anyone who works with children or wants to teach them more effectively.

A good overview of how to approach various subjects in a way that isn't "teaching," but learning. A useful guide for adults who need a basic math refresher, as well! It would have been nice to see what this book would have been had he lived to finish it.

I've just discovered this maverick guy. What a trailblazer he was. I'm only sorry he died young and didn't stick around long enough to continue writing and publishing his magazine Growing Without Schooling. While I don't agree w/all his ideas, I do find many of them compelling. His analysis of how children learn and how the public school system discourages natural curiosity in favor of mass conformity makes so much sense! I recommend reading this one, as well as How Children Learn.

I read and re-read this book when I was in college, and it was instrumental in my becoming a classroom teacher. That was in the late 1970's, when many of us were deeply suspicious of the Establishment. We were looking for ways to be more genuine as people, and to make the world a better place for people of all genders, cultures, races, and religions. Holt's deep compassion for the inner lives of children was inspirational for me. Now that I've seen "the system" in action in various school districts, I find that while I share Holt's frustration with it, I also think he is barking up the wrong tree. Sure, we should listen to kids more and test them less. We should teach the whole child not just pour facts into a hole we drill into the top of their heads. BUT in fact, many kids benefit from direct instruction. I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to fit into the real world of age-segregated classrooms, detentions and grade-level standards. It turns out, though, that you can teach effectively within that framework. It's not ideal but it's reality.

In this book, John Holt explains how learn not only through academics, but by living life. Even though this book is more for homeschoolers, the message is important for everyone.

This is John Holt's most direct coverage about "unschooling" - why to do it, how to do it, and how to deal with those who believe otherwise. After his death in 1985, Pat Farenga continued his message, including updates to this work, primarily to comment on modern issues and the latest political developments. This book will challenge traditional views in a persuasive no-nonsense way. I suspect it will also challenge most home school parents to consider more creative methods based on their children's natural curiosity.

John Holt summarizes perfectly the problem with contemporary education: it emphasizes right answers rather than learning, production rather than thinking. Read this book to understand this problem and its results, as seen through his experience as a collaborative teacher and thoughtful observer. The rewards for "right answers" over thinking even persists at higher education levels. "What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it." (p. 232)

He advocates for schooling at home (and in the world) as the best method of education. "People teaching their children at home consistently do a good job because they have the time - and the desire - to know their children, their interest, the signs by which they show and express their feelings." (p. 36) Four key principles: 1. Children do not need to be "taught" in order to learn, and they often learn best when not taught, 2. Children are very interested in the adult world, 3. Children learn best when the subject is "embedded in the context of real life," 4. "Children learn best when their learning is connected with an immediate and serious purpose."

Holt blames the current system, pointing out that if a system consistently fails, the problem is with it, not its inputs or participants. In the summary section, he forcefully points out the negative effects of the current system - low self-esteem, ignorance about how to learn, and a mind trained not to want to do so.

So far, one of the great quotations I've found is:"It used to puzzle me that the students who made the most mistakes and got the worst marks were so often the first ones to hand in their papers. I used to say, 'If you finish early, take time to check your work, do some problems again.' Typical teacher's advice; I might as well have told them to flap their arms and fly. When the paper was in, the tension was ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry.... Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is less painful than worrying about the right thing to do." (74-75) This about sums up (1) the whole reason I was so bad at math when I was in grammar school and (2) why I am much better at revising work that I make up for myself than at revising work where it actually matters. My psychology is still that of a schoolchild.All this said, it feels a little dated: people are trying different things in their classrooms now, although (to be fair) change hasn't come terribly quickly.

So far, one of the great quotations I've found is:"It used to puzzle me that the students who made the most mistakes and got the worst marks were so often the first ones to hand in their papers. I used to say, 'If you finish early, take time to check your work, do some problems again.' Typical teacher's advice; I might as well have told them to flap their arms and fly. When the paper was in, the tension was ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry.... Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is less painful than worrying about the right thing to do." (74-75) This about sums up (1) the whole reason I was so bad at math when I was in grammar school and (2) why I am much better at revising work that I make up for myself than at revising work where it actually matters. My psychology is still that of a schoolchild.All this said, it feels a little dated: people are trying different things in their classrooms now, although (to be fair) change hasn't come terribly quickly.

John Holt's How Children Fail is one of those books that seems like something of a cultural artifact of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book's premise is that schools are places that essentially set kids up to fail and drain their enthusiasm for learning. The kids find ways to manipulate the system and are driven by fear to obey but not learn in any meaningful ways. Holt's treatise reads like a clarion call for the rebellion of the 1960s and all of the excesses of that era. And yet there's a lot more here than cultural critics might believe.

How Children Fail, for me at least, reveals some truths that have existed in American education for decades, if not centuries. His assessment of the system seems pretty reasonable to me. My experience backs up his observations of kids who come to hate learning as a direct result of their experiences in school.

Now this might be seen as a defense of the overly permissive excesses of the 1960s, but I don't think so. There were certainly excesses, but was the basic premise of educational reformers really all that far off the mark? Holt's book calls for kids to be more engaged in what they do; for educators to link education to the world we live in without creating an artificial and ultimately sterile "academic environment".

As a piece of writing, How Children Fail isn't great literature and much of the text seem pretty disjointed. But there is a lot of wisdom contained in these pages. As we move into the age of connectivity, the singularity, web 2.0, and all that kind of stuff, I think Holt's ideas are going to become a lot more feasible than they were 40 years ago. I remember reading Rousseau's Emile in graduate school and thinking that the ideas were good, but no society could ever produce the 1 on 1 teacher/student relationship outlined in the book. Technology doesn't quite get us there, but it gets us awfully close. Likewise, Holt's call for homeschooling seemed far-fetched at the time, but hasn't technological change made it too far more likely?

An interesting non-fiction book about the author’s efforts to become an amateur musician late in life. I say amateur not as a comment on his ability, but because he did not use music to make money - except by writing this book. The first and last chapters are the best, in which he recounts his personal experiences as a musician. The middle chapters are more of a journey narrative and were not as interesting to me.

But the book is inspiring if you are like me and trying to be more musical late in life.