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Top John Holt Quotes

Browse top 25 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by John Holt.

Favorite John Holt Quotes

1. "A teacher in class islike a man in the woods at night with a powerful flashlight in his hand.Wherever he turns his light, the creatures on whom it shines are aware of it,and do not behave as they do in the dark. Thus the mere fact of his watchingtheir behavior changes it into something very different. Shine where be will,he can never know very much of the night life of the woods." ~ John Holt
2. "We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in." ~ John Holt
3. "Books ... rarely, if ever, talk about what children can make of themselves, about the powers that from the day or moment of birth are present in every child." ~ John Holt
4. "Real social change is a process that takes place over time, usually quite a long time. At a given moment in history, 99 percent of a society may think and act one way on a certain matter, and only 1 percent think and act very differently. In time, that 1 percent may become 2 percent, then 5 percent, then 10, 20, 30 percent, until finally it becomes the dominant majority, and social change has taken place." ~ John Holt
5. "Pravi test karaktera nije koliko znamo napraviti, vec kako se ponašamo u situaciji kad nešto ne znamo napraviti." ~ John Holt
6. "A child whose life is full of the threat and fear of punishment is locked into babyhood. There is no way for him to grow up, to learn to take responsibility for his life and acts. Most important of all, we should not assume that having to yield to the threat of our superior force is good for the child's character. It is never good for anyone's character." ~ John Holt
7. "If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued." ~ John Holt
8. "Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives." ~ John Holt
9. "Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned." ~ John Holt
10. "No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back." ~ John Holt
11. "We learn to do something by doing it.There is no other way.John Holt" ~ John Holt
12. "schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat." ~ John Holt
13. "This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."It is the creed of a slave." ~ John Holt
14. "Fear, boredom, and resistance--they all go to makewhat we call stupid children." ~ John Holt
15. "Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen." ~ John Holt
16. "The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher." ~ John Holt
17. "Of all I saw and learned this past half year, one thing stands out. What goeson in the class is not what teachers think-- certainly not what I had alwaysthought. For years now I have worked with a picture in mind of what myclass was like. This reality, which I felt I knew, was partly physical, partlymental or spiritual. In other words, I thought I knew, in general, what thestudents were doing, and also what they were thinking and feeling. I see nowthat my picture of reality was almost wholly false. Why didn't I see thisbefore?" ~ John Holt
18. "It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing." ~ John Holt
19. "Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meetingby a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book — mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when othersare sitting in judgment on them." ~ John Holt
20. "To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted." ~ John Holt
21. "To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid." ~ John Holt
22. "The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape." ~ John Holt
23. "Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders." ~ John Holt
24. "It is not the teacher's proper task to be constantly testingand checking the understanding of the learner. That's the learner's task, andonly the learner can do it. The teacher's job is to answer questions whenlearners ask them, or to try to help learners understand better when they askfor that help." ~ John Holt
25. "I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything,that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts, tohave a model of the structure in one's mind. We can give other peoplenames, and lists, but we cannot give them our mental structures; they mustbuild their own." ~ John Holt

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John Holt Quotes
John Holt Quotes
John Holt Quotes

Today's Quote

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate."
Author: Charles Dickens

What Did John Holt Talk About?

Ear
Child
Hey
Thin
Learn
Children
Each
Teach
Tea
Wit
King
Here
Hen
Tan
Ten
Ring
Act
Owe
Sit
Rest
Thou
Threat
Questions
Question
Answer
Call
Earning
Era
Less
Lit
Mad
Pen
Per
Able

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