CoP 3 - Research - John Holt

Research looking at John Holt's How Children Learn, looking at case studies and methods of learning. 

Holt J. (1967) How Children Learn London: Penguin

How Children Learn

When we better understand the ways, conditions, and spirit in which children do their best learning, and are able to make school into a place where they can use and improve the style of thinking and learning natural to them, we may be able to prevent much of this failure.

School may then become a place in which all children grow, not just in size, not even in knowledge, but in curiosity, courage, confidence, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, patience, competence, and understanding. 

What teachers and learners need to know is what we have known for some time: first, that vivid, vital, pleasurable experiences are the easiest to remember, and secondly, that memory works best when unforced.

We do not need to learn more about the brain, as an organ, in order to make schools better. 

During the sixties a famous educational psychologist decided to do some research into how children look at things, in what kinds of patterns they scan unfamiliar objects. One of his team designed what they called an "eye camera.”

The more a child uses his sense of consistency, of things fitting together and making sense, to find and correct his own mistakes, the more he will feel that his way of using his mind works, and the better he will get at it. He will feel more and more that he can figure out for himself, at least much of the time, which answers make sense and which do not. But if, as usually happens, we point out all his mistakes as soon as he makes them, and even worse, correct them for him, his self-checking and self-correcting skill will not develop, but will die out. 

One of the most important things teachers can do for any learner is to make the learner less and less dependent on them. 

It is to say that when they learn in their own way and for their own reasons, children learn so much more rapidly and effectively than we could possibly teach them, that we can afford to throw away our curricula and our timetables, and set them free, at least most of the time, to learn on their own. 

If we begin by helping children feel that writing and reading are ways of talking to and reaching other people, we will not have to bribe and bully them into acquiring the skills; they will want them for what they do with them. 

In a number of these classrooms the teachers were making imaginative use of tape recorders. I have described earlier how helpful it is for many children to hear a story read aloud, while they follow the words with their eyes.

Any situation, any activity, that puts before us real problems that we have to solve for ourselves, problems for which there are no answers in any book, sharpens our intelligence. The arts, like the crafts and the skilled trades, are full of such problems, which is why our skilled artists, artisans, and craftsmen are very likely to be sharpwitted people. Their minds are active and inventive; they have to be. 

If you once let children evolve their own learning along paths of their choosing, you then must see it through and maintain the individuality of their work. You cannot begin that way and then say, in effect, "That was only a teaser," thus using your adult authority to devalue what the children themselves, in the meantime, have found most valuable. So if "Messing About" is to be followed by, or evolve into, a stage where work is more externally guided and disciplined, there must be at hand what I call "Multiply Programmed" material; material that contains written and pictorial guidance of some sort for the student, but which is designed for the greatest possible variety of topics, ordering of topics, etc., so that for almost any given way into a subject that a child may evolve on his own, there is material available which he will recognize as helping him farther along that very way. Heroic teachers have sometimes done this on their own, but it is obviously one of the places where designers of curriculum materials can be of enormous help, designing those materials with a rich variety of choices for teacher and child, and freeing the teacher from the role of "leader-dragger" along a single preconceived path, giving the teacher encouragement and real logistical help in diversifying the activities of a group.

Keeping their curiosity "well supplied with food" doesn't mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves. It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food--like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (if we can imagine such a thing).

But what the traditional Montessori schools are very firm about is that children cannot use these materials to do anything else, can't make them into trains or houses or people or whatever.

Whatever it is they want children to learn from these blocks, the children would learn faster if they were allowed to play freely with them. 

Children also try to use fantasy to make sense out of reality, make a mental model of reality that works. 

As important as fantasizing may be for children, we can't make them do it on demand, and we risk doing them a serious injury when we try.

We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else.

Papert

Children seem to be innately gifted learners, acquiring long before they go to school a vast quantity of knowledge by a process I call "Piagetian learning," or "learning without being taught.". . . They have to learn to have trouble with learning in general and mathematics in particular. . . . 

Our educational culture gives mathematics learners scarce resources for making sense of what they are learning. As a result our children are forced to follow the very worst model for learning mathematics. This is the model of rote learning, where material is treated as meaningless; it is a dissociated model. . . . The child's perception is fundamentally correct: The kind of mathematics foisted on children in school is not meaningful, fun, or even very useful. . . .

Already in the preschool years every child first constructs one or more preadult theorizations of the world and then moves toward more adultlike views. . . . Children do not follow a learning path that goes from one "true position" to another, more advanced "true position." Their natural learning paths include "false theories" that teach as much about theory building as true ones. 

To this I would add something even more important. Children even as young as two want not just to learn about but to be a part of our adult world. They want to become skillful, careful, able to do things and make things as we do. They want to talk as we do, that is, communicate ideas and feelings, and in that sense they do talk--even before they know any "real" words, which they learn not so that when they have enough of them they can begin to talk, but so that they can talk even better right now. In the same way, when a little older, they often want to write to other people even before they know how to make letter shapes or spell words, and they learn real shapes and spellings not so that later they may begin to write but so that other people may right now be able to read their writing. 

What is essential is to realize that children learn independently, not in bunches; that they learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please or appease the adults in power; and that they ought to be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. 

We will never get very far in education until we realize this and give up the delusion that we can know, measure, and control what goes on in children's minds. To know one's own mind is difficult enough. I am, to quite a high degree, an introspective