book-notes

How Children Learn

by John Holt

I, Michael Parker, own this book and took these notes to further my own learning. If you enjoy these notes, please purchase the book!

Learning About Children

A particular skill is not “located” in any one part of your brain, but you can say that one part of your brain is critical to carrying out a particular skill.
It is difficult to separate what we think about something from what we feel about it.
We cannot learn how children normally operate in experiments performed under artificial or even threatening circumstances.
It is only in the presence of loving, respectful, trusting adults that children will learn all they are capable of learning, or reveal to us what they are learning.

Games & Experiments

Carl Orff showed that when children are given many opportunities to improvise, to make up their own chants, rhythms, and tunes, their musical and verbal growth can be very rapid.
A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, and to imitate bigger people. So there must be something very strong with much of what we do in school if we feel the need to worry so much about “motivation.”
Keeping children from touching anything that is not theirs dampers their confidence. Instead we should teach children to treat objects carefully, use them as they are meant to be used, and to put the objects back where they belong.
It must be exciting for a child, playing a game with an adult, to feel that by doing a certain thing, he can make that omnipotent giant do something, and that he can keep this up for as long as he likes.
Very young children have what we could call an Instinct of Workmanship. They want to do something as well as they can, not to please someone else but to please themselves.
Children don’t seem to be born fearful of things. They learn what to fear from their elders.
Children, especially young ones, are very sensitive to emotion. They not only catch everything they feel, but blow it up to a larger-than-life size.
Children are cruel to each other, but they become distressed if near another child who is badly hurt or very unhappy. Few children are capable of the kind of sustained, deliberate cruelty so often shown by adults.
All children want and strive for increased mastery and control of the world around them, and all are to some degree humiliated, threated, and frightened by finding out that they don’t have it.
The word no, for a two-year old, is the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta rolled into one.
To many four-year olds, doing a puzzle is only a means to an end, namely gaining the approval of the teacher or of each other. To a younger child, not in a very competitive or status-conscious situation, such a task is an end in itself.
It’s useless to urge on people who are down; that just frightens or discourages them more. Instead we must draw them back, take off the pressure, reassure them, console them, and give them time to regain enough energy and courage to go back to the task.
The best games with children flow easily and naturally from the situation of the moment, and we must be ready to give up a game instantly and without regret if the child is not enjoying it.
Children find it fun to do something wrong that they know how to do right. Adults tend to discourage it, but we should enjoy and encourage it, as it is not always necessary to be right.
Children can use the scientific method, or the selective use of trial and error, to find something out, and are even conscious of using it.
When more people were craftsmen, children could easily learn by watching them. Now this is more difficult, because most work is not work as a child could understand it, and much work is now done by machines.
When a game teaches how something works, it also teaches that many actions have regular and predictable effects, and that the world is in many ways a sensible and trustworthy place.
Children resist unasked-for teaching because they hear in it the (perhaps unconscious) message, “You’re not smart enough to see that this is important to learn, and even if you were, you’re not smart enough to learn it.”
Children will ask for help if they need it. But sending them messages of doubt and distrust may destroy their confidence in their ability to learn for themselves, and convince them that they are too lazy, incurious, and stupid to learn.
One of the many great advantages of home-schooled education is that children have a chance to see their parents and other adults work, and to join in if they wish.
When playing with an instrument or machine for the first time, children must pile up quite a mass of raw sensory data before they can begin trying to sort it out and how to make sense of it.
A trained scientist asks nature a question and then cuts the noise of information to a minimum. But to a child in a strange world, everything is noise, and until he has a great deal of data, he has no idea what questions to ask or what questions there are to be asked.
Consequently, children are better able to tolerate confusing data, to pick out its patterns. They are also less likely to make fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or after having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider new and contradictory data.

Talk

To a baby, how a sound feels seems to be as important as the sound itself.
A puppy raised apart from other dogs will know how to bark when he gets old enough, but it is from hearing people speak around them that babies get the idea of “speaking.”
Perhaps two-year olds are so touchy because they discovered that they don’t know how to talk; they are bursting with things to say, needs, and feelings, but have no way to say them.
Children learn to speak by patient and persistent experiment. Above all, they are willing to do things wrong even while trying their best to do them right.
Babies and young children like to hear adult conversation, and will often sit quietly for a long time just to hear it. To help little children as they learn to talk, talk to them, and let them be around when we talk to others.
When we name an object, we put it into a class of things that are like it. But babies do not, for some time they see just a mass of shifting shapes and colors, a single, ever-changing picture in front of them, and not as separate elements.
A baby is only ready to assign a name to something when he sees that is independent of its environment, and that the something is one of a family or class of like things.
We only learn words after grasping the large idea of communication by speech, then interpreting tone and context, and finally intuiting a rough outline of the grammar or structure of language.
Too much quizzing of a child is likely to make him begin to think that learning does not mean figuring out how things work, but getting and giving answers that please grownups.
A child’s understanding of the world is uncertain and tentative. His understanding will grow faster if we can make ourselves have faith in it and leave it alone.
A family with little verbal skill can handicap a baby. Not just because there is so little talk, but also because, when the baby does try to talk, he is less often understood and thus less often encouraged.
Because children are so small, clumsy, inarticulate, foolish, and to some appealing, we easily underestimate the seriousness of many of their questions and concerns, and laugh at them indulgently or ignore them altogether.
Children will learn the language that most people speak around them. If a child grows up where people do not speak standard English, then we will do harm if we try to make him think that there is something wrong with his speech.
Children’s senses are keen, they notice everything, and they want to do things like the grownups. If we speak well, and they hear us, then they will soon speak as we do.
Children will not “freeze” mistakes as bad habits. They instead make successive approximations, where they try, make mistakes, and then correct those mistakes.
If it takes a long time to develop a good habit, then it will take just as long to develop a bad one. So we don’t always have to be in such a big hurry to correct children’s mistakes.
Children are good at gathering and storing vague information and waiting patiently until, someday, they find they know what it means.
Maybe children don’t like to hear stories of when they were younger because, to them, their littleness, helplessness, and clumsiness is not cute but humiliating, and so they don’t want to be reminded of it.
The children need the most practice talking in school, but typically the teacher gets it. A child only talks to the teacher, and only when called upon.
To give children more opportunity to speak, we could let them work in small groups, and to talk quietly as they work. This also encourages independent study and more thinking.
We only get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, if we use those words to say something that we want to say, to people we want to say it to, and for purposes that are our own.