How Children Fail

I was homeschooled all the way through high school. Although my parents did have an excellent curriculum, they simply didn't bother to make me read literature, great works, or write long essays. Holt asserts that given freedom - as I was - youngsters will naturally explore and educate themselves.This has proven to be absolutely true. In high school, I read Shakespeare, Milton, Boswell - for fun. I also read many works on science, history, and even math. Like many homeschoolers, this has paid off in ways other than education and love of learning - I'm a National Merit Scholar attending college for free.John Holt's idea of unshackling children from the bonds of boring, repetitive lessons works in real life.Furthermore, this book is well-written, adopting a diary-entry approach to let the teacher's discoveries come in the context of a story.I found his definition of intelligence, as an exploring attitude to life (to oversimply a bit), to be inspiring.His book "How Children Learn" is basically more of same. You wouldn't regret reading it, but of the two, this is the essential one.

Every parent should read this book. It gives a new view of what schools really do to our children. If it is read with a very open mind, one can see how true it is still today, and in some cases even worse! Parents please read!

The book how children fail reminded me of my own childhood, during my elementary school year. Yes, I too wanted to get the right answer to please my teacher and not to be the dummy in the eyes of the other students in order for them to have a laugh for the day. The teacher did suppress my indiviualism due to forcing me to have a lack of courage. My courage was often mistaken as misbehavior, and I was discouraged to speak my mind. I was taught to only speak in order to appease the teacher.I truly disliked control and teachers always had control over everything in class, decision making, recess, lunch, field trips etc. I could remember in my fifth grade class. I had a elderly teacher and my lessons in school was a big gap of not learning. All she was concerned with was retirement and not one intervened with the quality of our education.I respect the idea of a second teacher in the classroom observing the children responses to the lesson being giving to them. A second teacher evaluates how, why and when to encourage a child in regards to their learning capablities and/or interest.I plan to read the book more than once in order to gain a more knowlegde in regards to John Holt's observations. And I think it would be a good idea for other active teachers to also read how children fail, too.

Written in the mid-to-late Fifties, but still incredibly relevant today, "How Children Fail" was originally a series of memos composed by teacher John Holt to his fellow faculty at the primary school where he taught math. Holt was bothered by certain trends he noticed in the classroom -- among both the teachers and the students -- and started analyzing what he saw over the course of several years. Eventually his notes grew to the point where his fellow teachers persuaded him to edit and publish the book, and it has since become a cornerstone of educational theory. Regrettably, its lessons are all too often mouthed rather than taken to heart.Holt's contentions are simple: Children are born learners. This is not even a particularly controversial observation; Piaget was showing that children are inclined to learn more about their world from day one. But there was little or nothing in the current educational system -- designed for the training of factory-workers and desk jockeys, not thinkers and builders -- that supported actual learning. Obviously, Holt has plenty to say about rote learning, which to him is mostly useless when dealing with things like mathematics, where creative approaches are not only needed but urgently desired. One of the best examples of this comes when he gives his class a number of math problems to solve and says, "You've never seen problems like these before, and I don't care how you go about solving them, but try them out." The class eagerly got to work and did some real learning... until Holt was leaned on by the administration to "pick up the pace".This is the second thing that Holt notices: the sometimes subtler ways in which children are kept from learning. One is the pace and size of modern education. The other is the endless farrago of half-baked strategies which are little more than the same old recipes in disguise. Holt takes a moment, for instance, to talk about New Math, and shows that it doesn't matter how good the New Math is when it's just the Bad Old Math in disguise: "cook-bookery," as he puts it; a mindless set of recipes for getting right answers.Holt's contempt for the church of right answers is clear through the book. What is annoying is how his anger has since been misappropriated by people who did not understand that Holt's anger was directed at the emotional fetishism attached to right answers, not the right answers themselves. Holt very obviously wanted children to learn and use their minds -- something which modern outcome-based education, derived at least in part from books like these, does not allow. Holt should really not be blamed for the development of educational fads that would have sickened him.On top of everything else, the book is also a grand work of classroom sociology. The way kids interact with each other and their teachers, the way they do one thing and say another (and why) is dissected and shown up. And Holt also takes the time to show how parents do stupid things like u

If you can't homeschool your children, pray that they have a teacher like John Holt. He seems so free from ego, that he is able to write about his own mistakes and shortcomings as a teacher, even while clearly presenting the shortcomings of the system. He is so compassionate, and writes from practical experience, about specific children, classes and events that are exemplary. I felt like giving some of these children hugs, before I remembered that they must be adults with their own kids by now. The positive side is that he elucidates the alternative to current school education, and how that will work better for the children. Meanwhile the ominous trends he noted in 1983 are even more in evidence now in election year 2000.