John Holt
John Caldwell Holt was an American educator, teacher, and writer who worked in the English language across the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Born on April 14, 1923, in New York City, Holt received his early education at Phillips Exeter Academy. He went on to work as a teacher and educator, roles he held as a citizen of the United States throughout his career. His identity as both a classroom teacher and a published author placed him across two distinct but related fields of practice.
Holt's work encompassed the roles of teacher, educator, and pedagogue. He wrote in English and produced work as an author, contributing to the literature of his field. His standing as a pedagogue situated him within the formal study and practice of teaching, while his work as a writer gave that standing a public dimension extending beyond the classroom itself.
Holt died on September 14, 1985, in Boston. The overlapping roles he occupied — teacher, educator, pedagogue, and author — defined the arc of a career that began in New York City and ended in Boston, with Phillips Exeter Academy marking an early formative stage in his education. Pedagogy, in both its practical and written dimensions, remained the consistent thread connecting the several roles he held across his professional life.
Quotes by John Holt
John Holt's insights on:
The danger of letting people ask, “Is this the best way to do this job?” is that after a while they may ask, “Is this job worth doing?
If s-chools, doing places for children, are honest, active, and interesting enough, they will not need to be compulsory; as long as they are compulsory, they don’t need to be good, and most of them will not be. To say that schools must be compulsory because someday they might all be good, is to say in effect that they must be compulsory no matter how bad they are. I.
Despite all the talk about the technological demands of modern society, or the great need of education to enable people to meet these demands, the fact is that most modern work is moronic. It needs almost nothing in training, skill, intelligence, or judgment. During World War II we found that even the most highly skilled industrial jobs, jobs that people supposedly had to spend years learning, could be learned from scratch by most people of average intelligence in a few months.
John, if you ever get a family, there’s one thing you should know. No matter how well you get along with your children when they are little, there is going to come a time when they will have no use for you, and you should be ready for it.
When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become “producers ” they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is “yes,” and that a “no” is defeat.
A child whose life is full of the threat and fear of punishment is locked into babyhood. There is no way for him to grow up, to learn to take responsibility for his life and acts. Most important of all, we should not assume that having to yield to the threat of our superior force is good for the child’s character. It is never good for anyone’s character.
We don’t have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.
It’s a most serious mistake to think that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life, that people do it best when they are not doing anything else and best of all in places where nothing else is done. p.278.
Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons: they think that raising their children is their business not the government’s; they enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don’t want to give that up to others; they want to keep them from being hurt, mentally, physically, and spiritually.