The Mask of Troy: A Novel (Jack Howard)

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.

I was struggling to teach seventh grade reading when I came across this book. It had been mentioned in a William Gaddis essay, so I picked it up and I can honestly say that it's changed the way I look at the world. Like all great books, it says things that seem to always have been under your nose, that always bothered you a little, and says them with such simplicity that you're not sure how you could have missed them. Once Holt's ideas are in your head I assure you that they'll become part of your mental model of the way things work: every time I was in front of my classroom I could see my students reading me for answers, and engaging in a hundred games and subterfuges based on the anxiety caused by the way my school forced me to run things - along, of course, with what I had always assumed education had to be.It bothers me that this book is given to teachers who agree with its observations but declare that the solution is not to create the sort of environment that Holt recommends, but to keep schools exactly the same and just make it harder for kids to fake the answers; to engage in a battle of wits to force them to think; and provide all sorts of unrelated incentives to get the students to try their hardest. This book forced me to look at how phony most of my teaching was, and I am confident that the solution does not involve putting a slightly new face to the phoniness.

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

Holt taught in both public and exclusive private schools. In both places he observed his (and others') students and was astonished by how deeply children were afraid of failure, even at schools where grading was de-emphasised and care taken to keep learning from being competitive. As a result of this fear, children frequently seemed to deliberately hold back from learning; they did not want to learn. Toddlers are curious about everything; they want to know about everything. Once in school, children lose interest in learning, something Holt finds more than a coincidence; this loss of interest and growing fear of failure and being thought stupid--thinking oneself stupid--will happen whenever learning is institutionalized and made an explicit goal, something that must be achieved at set times, in set ways, at a set pace, with one's success or failure known to all, whether given a letter or number or not. Holt became an advocate of radical school reform as a result of his observations, but, correctly realizing that the chances of this were extremely slim, he eventually advocated bypassing schools altogether and letting children learn at home, in their own way, at their own pace--a theory he discusses in detail in "Teach Your Own." Holt thus is the main person responsible for what is now known as homeschooling (he called it, and those who do it in accordance with his ideas still call it, unschooling). "How Children Fail" is of interest as the book that gives the principles of unschooling in a general way, as the book that led to homeschooling as a second, and cheap, option to public schools, as a critique of public and private schools, as an interesting adjuct to the work of Michel Foucault, as a theory of education in general, and as a work of child psychology.