Skip to content

The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know.

— John Holt How Children Learn (1967)

Another quote →

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 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

How Children Fail (1964)

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)

All John Holt quotes →

Attribution

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.