Word: holt
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...difficult to think that colorful elementary school classrooms and matronly teachers are agents for fear inhibiting every child's growth. But John Holt, with examples from his own experience (he is a teacher who has observed children for years) shows schools do more to prevent than foster learning. Holt's plea is simple: schools must not accommodate the needs of teachers and administrators but the needs of children as they grow into the world...
...previous work, Holt's condemnation of American schools in What Do I Do Monday? is stunning. The fundamental problem is that teachers and students have different understandings of the purpose of school. A teacher thinks a student is learning to read and write and each assignment contributes toward these skills. But a child sees no importance in his daily tasks like vocabulary and spelling drills because he does not know where they lead. His day seems to be only a series of assignments he completes to win the approval of his teachers and parents...
...HOLT FIRST presented evidence of this problem in How Children Fail, published in 1964. He looked at one surprisingly complex phenomenon, a child's response when a teacher asked a question. Instead of looking happily and rationally for an answer, the child, in a "panicky search for certainty." guesses at the teacher's expectations and lunges for them. In order to protect himself from humiliation he often stops making any effort to find answers if he continually fails to please. At this point, because he does not do what the teacher tells him to do, he has problems with "motivation...
...Holt's work is particularly compelling because he arrived at his conclusions about education by detecting contradictions in his own classroom. His pupils are supposed to become more rational and confident-but instead they become more and more dependent on other people to decide what is right for them. Over seven years of writing Holt slowly became aware of more complexities of the oppression in schools. Each successive book since 1964 has been a fuller and more powerful statement...
...What Do I Do Monday? Holt does not concentrate on problems in the schools but instead defines what real education should be in terms of what he calls a mental model: "Each of us lives not so much in an objective out there world that is the same for all of us, but in his mental model of the world. It is his model of the world that he experiences.... I live in my mental model of the world and my mental model lives in me." The mental model is one of the four models he describes. World...