Quotes by John Holt

“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 schoo...”

“Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so...”

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

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

“This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling pr...”

“For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had some...”

“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 explorati...”

“Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meetingby a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized th...”

“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 m...”

“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.”