76 Quotes by John Holt

The curse of our time, perhaps soon a fatal one, is not idleness, but work not worth doing, done by people who hate it, who do it only because they fear that if they do not they will have no ‘job’, no livelihood, and worse than that, no sense of being useful or needed or worthy.

Deny children – or anyone else - the chance to do ‘nothing’, and we may be denying them the chance to do ‘something’ - to find and do any work that is truly important, to themselves or to someone else.

You don’t have to have school buildings in order to have schools and you don’t have to have schools in order to have education.

Learning is not the product of teaching.

Figuring out what you don't know or aren't sure of is the greatest intellectual skill of all.

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.

We are all afraid of many things; we probably can't help that. What we can try to do is not give in to our fears, but face them down instead. There is excitement in that.

Feeling great fear is like feeling great pain; it is like being inside a little box of one-way glass; others can see and hear you, but for you the world almost disappears.

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.