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- John Holt (author)John Holt (author)-Life:Holt was born at Hattersley, near Mottram in Longdendale, Cheshire, in 1743. About 1757 he settled at Walton-on-the-Hill, near Liverpool, where for many years he acted as parish clerk, highway surveyor, and master of the free grammar school, besides at one time keeping a ladies’ school.He...
(1743–1801), English author
The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do
The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence.
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 first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.
The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know.
No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.
The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.