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Title: How Children Fail (Classics in Child Development) by John Caldwell Holt ISBN: 0-201-48402-1 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.94 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Absolutely essential to any teacher
Comment: Written in the mid-to-late Fifties, but still incredibly relevant today, "How Children Fail" was originally a series of memos composed by teacher John Holt to his fellow faculty at the primary school where he taught math. Holt was bothered by certain trends he noticed in the classroom -- among both the teachers and the students -- and started analyzing what he saw over the course of several years. Eventually his notes grew to the point where his fellow teachers persuaded him to edit and publish the book, and it has since become a cornerstone of educational theory. Regrettably, its lessons are all too often mouthed rather than taken to heart.
Holt's contentions are simple: Children are born learners. This is not even a particularly controversial observation; Piaget was showing that children are inclined to learn more about their world from day one. But there was little or nothing in the current educational system -- designed for the training of factory-workers and desk jockeys, not thinkers and builders -- that supported actual learning. Obviously, Holt has plenty to say about rote learning, which to him is mostly useless when dealing with things like mathematics, where creative approaches are not only needed but urgently desired. One of the best examples of this comes when he gives his class a number of math problems to solve and says, "You've never seen problems like these before, and I don't care how you go about solving them, but try them out." The class eagerly got to work and did some real learning... until Holt was leaned on by the administration to "pick up the pace".
This is the second thing that Holt notices: the sometimes subtler ways in which children are kept from learning. One is the pace and size of modern education. The other is the endless farrago of half-baked strategies which are little more than the same old recipes in disguise. Holt takes a moment, for instance, to talk about New Math, and shows that it doesn't matter how good the New Math is when it's just the Bad Old Math in disguise: "cook-bookery," as he puts it; a mindless set of recipes for getting right answers.
Holt's contempt for the church of right answers is clear through the book. What is annoying is how his anger has since been misappropriated by people who did not understand that Holt's anger was directed at the emotional fetishism attached to right answers, not the right answers themselves. Holt very obviously wanted children to learn and use their minds -- something which modern outcome-based education, derived at least in part from books like these, does not allow. Holt should really not be blamed for the development of educational fads that would have sickened him.
On top of everything else, the book is also a grand work of classroom sociology. The way kids interact with each other and their teachers, the way they do one thing and say another (and why) is dissected and shown up. And Holt also takes the time to show how parents do stupid things like use homework as punishment (a great way to kill a kid's curiosity).
The most remarkable thing about the book is how after thirty years it is still relevant, timely, accurate, readable, and indispensible.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting
Comment: I was assigned this book within my Education class at Macon State college. This book for me shifted back and forth between interesting and boring. Simply because it was very detailed at times and very repetetive at times. It really started getting better when I got to the section "how school's fail". I already work in the school system as a paraprofessional and I see a lot of what Holt talks about. I also agree with him that sometimes you have to slow down to a child's pace and back up to where the child is in order to bring them up. You can't just expect them to catch up with the same work the other children are keeping up with.
The idea with the balance beam experiment was good. It really gave the children something to think about. Children need to learn to think for themselves and not have everything just told to them. The Cuisenaire rods seemed like a good idea at a point, but Holt just went into too much detail and repetition in the book with them. It made it hard to read much of those sections.
Rating: 4
Summary: Great viewpoint on children
Comment: I have been homeschooling my 6 children for over 10 years. This is one of the best books on education that I've read.
Holt really just advocates that we treat children with respect, and allow them some self determinism in their own education.
It is a radical viewpoint, unfortunately - he really strips away many of the false notions regarding education that the teacher's colleges seem to promote - but I think it's a sane viewpoint, all the same. Children raised and educated this way are surely more whole, stable, self-confident and able.
The book is a series of essays, which is a great format for this kind of material. I found it really compelling reading.
While I don't agree with absolutely everything in this book (he recommends that we have children guess at word meanings, rather than having them use a dictionary, which I strongly disagree with), almost everything else he says rings true for me.
Highly recommmended!
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Title: How Children Learn (Classics in Child Development) by John Caldwell Holt ISBN: 0201484048 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Learning All the Time by John Caldwell Holt ISBN: 0201550911 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling by John Holt, Patrick Farenga, Pat Farenga ISBN: 0738206946 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore, David Albert ISBN: 0865714487 Publisher: New Society Pub Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom by Mary Griffith ISBN: 0761512764 Publisher: Prima Lifestyles Pub. Date: 29 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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