John Holt Quotes

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experiences they want their children to have.

The true test of character is ... how we behave when we don't know what to do.

Books ... rarely if ever talk about what children can make of themselves about the powers that from the day or moment of birth are present in every child.

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher.

We learn to do something by doing it.There is no other way.

By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child’, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good

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

Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.