How Children Learn Quotes

“But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“The person who really needs to know something does not need to be told many times, drilled, tested. Once is enough.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“For a long time I have been interested in my own thoughts, feelings, and motives, eager to know as much as I can of the truth about myself. After many years, I think that at most I may know something about a very small part of what goes on in my own head. How preposterous to imagine that I can know what goes on in someone else's.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“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.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“My goal has always been to inspire in them an ongoing love of learning. To awaken a feeling where their work is their passion, so that they never feel burdened or trapped by meeting their material needs, but instead thrive and experience wealth doing what they love while making a positive contribution to the world. To me that is the truest definition of success.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, Born To Learn

“If we try to make children fantasize, these fake fantasies, like the ready-made fantasies of TV, will in time drive out most of their true fantasies, the ones that come from their experience in the world and their need to make sense of it and become at home in it.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“I simply stepped out of the way and maintained my courage and my position in the face of constant disagreement, voiced opinion and attack. I held true and I stood my ground. I maintained my convictions and my commitment to allowing them to live in the kingdom of childhood. I protected them from outside influence and allowed their imaginations to soar. I instilled a lifelong love of learning in them and I shared my passion for reading. I allowed them to choose what they wanted to study and I provided the resources for them to delve in, unguided and undisturbed for however long they needed to gather what they believed to be enough understanding to satisfy their own personal drive.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, Born To Learn

“How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“There is more real learning in a good picture than in twenty workbooks.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“The only thing to do was to turn off the questions and watch - like a child. Take it all in. See everything, worry about nothing.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“Words are not only a clumsy and ambiguous means of communication, they are extraordinarily slow.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“With the bike right before them, they could not see how it was put together, or if they could, could not hold that knowledge in mind long enough to transfer it to paper. It seemed as if their schooling had been for so long so far removed from reality that they were no longer able to see reality, to grasp it, to come to grips with it.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn

“If he didn't know what it was "supposed" to do, he wasn't going to try to make it do anything; it might do the wrong thing, and someone might think it was his fault.”
― John Holt, How Children Learn