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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.

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Learning

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)

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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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

G. K. Chesterton

There is the love of knowing without the love of learning; the beclouding here leads to dissipation of mind.

Confucius

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

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.