12/6/22

Riveting from the first page to the last, the style is engaging and illuminating. The anecdotes also corroborate my experience and just "feel" right. Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if the establishment has paid any attention to his observations: I know of no government school systems that devote any attention at all to the students other than telling them what & how we want them to absorb and ignoring their innate capacities for learning. ( )

mostly read revisions, reading Holt makes me feel guilty and angry about my own children's education

An eye-opening book on how children learn in their environments and how they learn better and faster outside of schools. A must read for any homeschool family. ( )

From the foreword:
"It is before they get to school that children are likely to do their best learning. (...) young children tend to learn better than grownups (and better than they themselves will when they are older) because they use their minds in a special way. In short, children have a style of learning that fits their condition, and which they use naturally and well until we train them out of it." (p. i)
"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."(p. viii-ix)
"Making judgments about how the mind or the brain (they're not the same) works on the basis of a few (...) squiggles on a chart is like deciding what lives in the ocean by lowering and then pulling up a five-gallon bucket and seeing what you can find in it. Nor is the situation much improved by using bigger buckets." (p. 8) ( )