John Holt Quotes

Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives.

If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.

It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

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

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are.

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

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