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The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do

— John Holt How Children Fail (1964)

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More quotes by John Holt

No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.

Escape from Childhood (1974)

It is not just power, but impotence, that corrupts people. It gives them the mind and soul of slaves. It makes them indifferent, lazy, cynical, irresponsible, and, above all, stupid.

Escape from Childhood (1974)

The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

How Children Learn (1967)

The idea of painless, non-threatening 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.

How Children Fail (1964)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Holt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.