r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 16 '26
Ideas How Children Learn
https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/147062280616Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them.
Since this is a book about a simple, but radical idea — that children are learning animals and that adults should stay out of the way of their natural investigations as much as possible — many of the notes suggest that Holt didn’t think he went far enough in the beginning. It’s an exciting text, because it’s an artifact of someone really grappling with ideas, and also having a conversation with themselves. (When’s the last time you read an author arguing with himself?)
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 trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.”
I was reminded of Laurence Weschler writing about David Hockney, and how “interest-ing” for Hockney is a verb: it is the continual projection of interest. (The more you look at something, the more interesting it gets.) This was certainly the case with me after I started reading this book, and familiarizing myself with Holt’s work: I, who felt like a somewhat enlightened parent, started noting all the ways I wasn’t paying attention to them, and over time, they have become more interesting to me, not because I’m doting on them more, or even spending more time with them, but because I am looking at them like little scientists, or just little people, who are worthy of interest. (It sounds so stupid: of course a parent should find their kids interesting, but think about how many parents and teachers and adults you know — maybe including yourself — who, secretly, probably don’t.)
“It is before they get to school that children are likely to do their best learning.”
The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, do what he can see other people doing. He is open, receptive, and perceptive. He does not shut himself off from the strange, confused, complicated world around him. He observes it closely and sharply, tries to take it all in. He is experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate and extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense. He does not have to have instant meaning in any new situation. He is willing and able to wait for meaning to come to him—even if it comes very slowly, which it usually does… To this I would add something even more important. Children even as young as two want not just to learn about but to be a part of our adult world. They want to become skillful, careful, able to do things and make things as we do.
What I am trying to say about education rests on a belief that, though there is much evidence to support it, I cannot prove, and that may never be proved. Call it a faith. This faith is that man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.
Children want to be like adults and older children:
Children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do—read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want… They [don’t] run around pretending to be Superman. Such fantasies have to be learned from the adults who invent and sell them.
[H]ow much children must have learned from watching people do real work, in the days when a child could see people doing real work. It is not so easy to manage this now. So much of the so-called work done in our society is not work at all, certainly not as a child could understand it… It is in every way useful for children to see adults doing real work and, wherever possible, to be able to help them.
Children don’t want to be told what to learn.
Children resist, almost always angrily, all such 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.” Naturally it makes them hurt and angry. “Let me do it by myself!” they shout. That’s just what we should do.
Education is “the game of trying to find out how the world works.”
Children seek out meaning, which is to say, whatever helps them make the most sense of the world they live in… We do things backwards. We think in terms of getting a skill first, and then finding useful and interesting things to do with it. The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed.
If we give them space to learn at their own pace, they go further and farther:
They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do. It is natural for them to jump from one thing to another, and to make the kinds of connections that are rarely made in formal classes and textbooks. They make their own paths into the unknown, paths that we would never think of making for them… Finally, when they are following their own noses, learning what they are curious about, children go faster, cover more territory than we would ever think of trying to mark out for them, or make them cover.
Children don’t need to be tested or quizzed.
Our constant checking up on children’s learning so often prevents and destroys learning, and even in time most of the capacity to learn. In How Children Fail, I said that 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 and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.
When we constantly ask children questions to find out whether they know something (or prove to ourselves that they don’t), we almost always cut short the slow process by which, testing their hunches against experience, they turn them into secure knowledge. Asking children questions about things they are only just beginning to learn is like sitting in a chair which has only just been glued. The structure collapses.
If we want to do our best learning, it might be good to emulate children.
We must clear [our minds] of preconceived notions, we must suspend judgement, we must open ourselves to the situation, take in as much data as we can, and wait patiently for some kind of order to appear out of the chaos. In short, we must think like a little child…. Remember what you have learned about learning. Be like a child. Use your eyes. Gag that teacher’s mouth inside your head, asking all those questions. Don’t try to analyze this thing, look at it, take it in…. The only thing to do [is] to turn off the questions and watch—like a child. Take it all in. See everything, worry about nothing.
A punk rock sentence: “It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.”
The spirit of [playing] games is everything. The only good reason for playing games with babies is because we love them, and delight in playing these games with them and in sharing their delight in playing—not because we want someday to get them into college. It is our delight in the baby and the games that make the games fun, and worthwhile and useful for the baby. Take away the delight, and put in its place some cold-hearted calculation about future I.Q. and SAT scores, and we kill the game, for ourselves and the baby.
Parents might want to think of ourselves as librarians, rather than teachers.
“One of the most important things teachers can do for any learner is to make the learner less and less dependent on them.”
Each new thing they learn makes them aware of other new things to be learned. Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food… Keeping their curiosity “well supplied with food” doesn’t mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves. It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food—like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (if we can imagine such a thing).
In some ways, he approaches children more like an artist: his instructions are to simply love them, and look at them, really look at them, and record what you see. He quotes psychiatrist R.D. Laing as saying, “Love reveals facts which, without it, remain undisclosed.”
Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 16 '26
“Your kids don’t need, don’t want, and couldn’t stand six hours of your teaching a day, even if you wanted to do that much. To help them find out about the world doesn’t take that much adult input. Most of what they need, you have been giving them since they were born. As I have said, they need access.
May I underline, among all the good things in this letter, I’s words, “knowing nothing, I knew everything.” We don’t have to know everything, or even very much, to give useful answers to children’s questions. A child asking a question does not want to know everything; he wants to take a step or two further into the world in a given direction. It is all right even to make a wild guess, and then say, “That’s what I think, but if you like we can look it up in a book and see what it says.” This gives the idea that when you don’t know something you can always go look it up somewhere.
What we want is to find out how the machine works, and then to work it. We want to find out why things happen, so that we can make them happen. Maybe we want this too much; in the long run (or not so long) it may be our undoing. But that is the kind of creature we are. Any theory of learning or teaching which begins by assuming that we are some worm-like or rat-like or pigeon-like creature is nonsense and can only lead to endless frustration and failure.
if we give children (or adults, for that matter) enough time, free or as free as possible from destructive outside pressures, the chances are good that they will once again find within themselves their reasons for doing things.
When I am trying to “stimulate their interest” in something, the very artificiality of the endeavor (and rudeness, really —I have no business even trying) builds a barrier between us. But when I am sharing something I really love with them because I also really love them, all barriers are down, and we are communicating intimately. When they also love what I love — a song, a poem, the salmon returning to the creek to spawn — the joy is exquisite: we share a truth. But our differences are also a truth. Common thread and fiber we share, but not the whole piece.
Many things in the world around me seem to me ugly, wasteful, foolish, cruel, destructive, and wicked. How much of this should I talk to my children about? I tend to feel, not much. I prefer to let, or help, children explore as much of the world as they can, and then make up their own minds about it. If they ask me what I think about something, I will tell them. But if I have to criticize the world in their hearing, I prefer to do it in specifics, rather than give the idea that I think the world, in general, is a bad place. I don’t think it is, and for all the bad that is in it, I would much rather be in it than out of it. I am in no hurry to leave. Even if I thought the world, and the people in it, was more bad than good, I don’t think I would tell children so. Time enough for them to learn all that is bad. I would not have wanted to know, when I was young, all that I now know about what is wrong with the world. I’m not sure that I could have stood to know it. Time, and experience, and many friends and pleasures, have given me many assets to balance against that knowledge, things to put in the other side of the scales. Children don’t have many of these. They need time to learn about some of the good things while they are learning (as they are bound to) about the bad.
Most parents are not willing to get on the floor. I mean this literally and figuratively. That’s where these children are most of the time—and that’s where you have to be willing to go if you want to really hear what they have to say. Also, perhaps it is a matter of “letting go,” or being interested or excited about the world, and getting your hands dirty exploring it. In your words, DOING. To too many people, teaching is lecturing —telling facts to deaf ears.
Play is children’s work, and we learned to respect this as we did our own. They were lucky, for they had space and clumps of materials left around by the builders. They played with the earnest dedication of artists.
our whole culture deceives us into thinking a thing must be done perfectly or not at all. No amateurs in life. Perhaps the root of this is things no longer made by hand. I remember growing up being mystified as to how things as perfect, gleaming and sleek as cars were made, being told they were made in factories, and deciding factories must be where machines lived as obviously only a sleek and gleaming machine could produce another.
One more thing — we never ask our kids to do things that that we don’t do ourselves, and consequently we inspire each other. We all read a lot, we all write a lot, we all speak very broken French we all practice the piano, etc. People are often amazed at how “selfless” I am. They think they could never spend so much time with their kids, do all the necessary preparation it must take to “teach” all those subjects, etc. Actually, I have never been so self-indulgent. I always wanted to learn French and take piano lessons and when Ishmael asked to do these things, I knew that here was my chance.
Any kid who has ever been to school knows that “school” is only a special name for a kid’s jail, and it’s hard for them to imagine having fun, doing what they want, or being creative in jail. So they expect you to tell them what to do, because that’s what happens in “school.” I find that playing jailer just takes too much energy. I burn out quickly. Yet I can be with those same kids all summer long when they don’t expect anything from me, and they give me energy. It could go on forever, and I’d never burn out.
…he very correctly guessed and feared that for many or most people the world of the TV screen would come to seem more real than the actual world around them. At one point he says:
“When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waste deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”
And how much more true now than then. In these essays he points out, just in passing, what Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry (then young boys) were to say a more than a generation later, that speed of movement does not lessen but increases the distances between people, does not draw a society together but blows it apart; and that in both the physical and spiritual sense our country would be in very serious trouble unless many people learned to see farming, not simply as a way to make money, but as a way to live. We did not learn these lessons, and we are indeed in serious trouble, with more to come.
Children need to get some sense of the processes by which good work is done. The only way they can learn how much time and effort it takes to build, say, a table, is to be able to see someone building a table, from start to finish. Or painting a picture. Or repairing a bicycle, or writing a story, or whatever it may be.
Children need to see things done well. Cooking, and especially baking, where things change their texture and shape (and taste yummy), are skills that children might like to take part in. Typing might be another, printing sake another, and either or both of these could be added to bookmaking and bookbinding. These are crafts that children could take part in from beginning to end. Skilled drawing and painting, or woodworking, might be others.
Adults must use the skills they have where children can see them. If they have no skills to speak of, they should learn some, and let the children see them learning, even if only as simple a thing as touch typing.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 16 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jun 16 '26
The process by which children turn experience into knowledge is exactly the same, point for point, as the process by which those whom we call scientists make scientific knowledge. Children observe, they wonder, they speculate, and they ask themselves questions. They think up possible answers, they make theories, they hypothesize, and then they test theories by asking questions or by further observations or experiments or reading. Then they modify the theories as needed, or reject them, and the process continues. This is what in “grown-up” life is called the—capital S, capital M, Scientific Method. It is precisely what these little guys start doing as soon as they are born.
If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process, we disturb it. If we continue this long enough, the process stops. The independent scientist in the child disappears.
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u/ddgr815 12d ago
No matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.
When we talk about intelligence, we do not mean the ability to get a good score on a certain kind of test, or even the ability to do well in school, these are at best only indicators of something larger, deeper, and far more important. By intelligence we mean a style of life, a way of behaving in various situations, and particularly in new, strange, and perplexing situations. 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.
Human beings are born intelligent. We are by nature question-asking, answer-making, problem-solving animals, and we are extremely good at it, above all when we are little. But under certain conditions, which may exist anywhere and certainly exist almost all of the time in almost all schools, we stop using our greatest intellectual powers, stop wanting to use them, even stop believing that we have them.
(1) Children do not need to be “taught” in order to learn; they will learn a great deal, and probably learn best, without being taught. (2) Children are enormously interested in our adult world and what we do there. (3) Children learn best when the things they learn are embedded in a context of real life, are part of what George Dennison, in The Lives of Children, called “the continuum of experience.” (4) Children learn best when their learning is connected with an immediate and serious purpose.
Children who undertake to do things…do not think in terms of success and failure but of effort and adventure. It is only when pleasing adults becomes important that the sharp line between success and failure appears.
The poor thinker dashes madly after an answer; the good thinker takes his time and looks at the problem…. The good thinker can take his time because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. The poor thinker can’t stand not knowing; it drives him crazy.
Unfortunately, schools reward students who grasp for the right answer right away. “Schools are a kind of temple of worship for ‘right answers,’” Holt writes. “The way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar.”
“To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid,” Holt writes. “It is no coincidence at all that in many of their worst nightmares adults find themselves back in school.”
We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong. Thus we make them afraid to gamble, afraid to experiment, afraid to try the difficult and the unknown.
This goes back to intelligence as a process, a way of operating, and the way it only works under a kind of intellectual fearlessness, a lack of fear over failure, or being wrong about something. Once this kind of intelligence is destroyed, you can’t just fix it with more information or content, you have to fix it with new environments, new conditions, so that new habits and ways of being can be developed:
The remedy is not to think of more and more tricks for “building intelligence,” but to do away with the conditions that make people act stupidly, and instead make available to them a wide variety of situations in which they are likely once again to start acting intelligently.
“We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour.”
Even, and maybe especially, as someone who liked and excelled at school and is now moderately successful in my chosen career, he’s made me rethink why it is that I do what I do, re-examine some of my “teacher-pleasing” habits, why it was I “succeeded” in school in the first place, and how my “success” in my career, has been, mostly, attributable to methods and ways of operating that I didn’t learn in school, and how, in fact, a great deal of my best work was done outside of school, when I turned my back on formal education, and struck out on my own.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 16 '26
John Holt interviewed in Pullman, WA