This is sad and frustrating for anyone truly invested in educating anyone. It is amazing and alarming that the diseased seeds Holt saw being planted in the mid-twentieth century have now blossomed and flourished into full-blown rotten, choking vines, an educational Kudzu from which it is almost impossible to extricate actual education. I was encouraged because Holt’s experiences seem to confirm many of the ideas I have been bandying about in my head as I try to educate my own students, ideas full of hope and the notion that we CAN change society’s screwed-up, anti-instinctual notions of how people are best educated.īut what is depressing is that this book was written SIXTY YEARS AGO, and way too many of the backward, counterproductive, even harmful practices, thoughts, and attitudes Holt identifies in the book still dominate education! In fact, some of them (such as the Sacred Cow known as standardized testing) are even MORE ingrained now, at once bloating and eating away at education in the exact ways Holt predicted if they were not corrected. I was at once encouraged and depressed by this book. This is refreshingly honest in a field crowded by lazy and cowardly theory and practice aimed at maintaining conventional wisdom and the status quo, both of which are deadly to real and lasting education. Indicative of Holt's earnest desire to objectively account for how children learn or don't learn is his willingness to be as critical of his own methods and philosophical conclusions as he is of others'. The structure of the book is built around Holt's journal of his experiences team-teaching with another man in the late '50s/early '60s (one taught while the other observed the children), interspersed with Holt's own comments, amendments, contradictions, and clarifications some 30 years later. It is a remarkably gimmick-free book that attempts to put aside the supply-side notion of 'how can we as teachers discover clever methods for imparting knowledge to our captive charges?' in favor of 'how do students actually and naturally learn, and how can we as teachers facilitate that learning?' The difference between these two questions may seem subtle, but the distinction is crucial if our goal is to truly educate.

He approaches the subject almost as a scientist, eschewing fancy, obfuscating academic language as well as cleverness and finger-pointing. Holt has a way of cutting through the bullshit when it comes to how children learn (or more realistically, as the book contends: how they do NOT learn) in schools.

How Children Fail by John C. Holt