How Children Fail

John Holt was a teacher who started asking himself why his students weren’t learning what he was teaching. This book brings you along his journey of reflections upon his students and his attempts to find a way to teach his students in a way that they gained real understanding and knowledge. He sees students that can get a right answer, but not actually understand or apply the knowledge and also the inverse. An example of this he shares was a moment where he sees a boy from his class using math in a real life situation (calculating bowling scores), but in class can’t get a right answer doing functionally the same thing. This difficulty becomes a question he ponders and tries to rectify in how he teaches, but with only limited success. In the end he concludes that the school system and environment is an obstacle in itself to real learning.  

As John Holt is working to discover why his students aren’t learning, he considers how material is presented, and shares different ideas he tried. He looks at the students themselves. One of his observations of an attribute children share who really understand what they were being taught is that they are “intensely involved with life” and they “embrace life”. -pg 89

“The fact is that problems and answers are simply different ways of looking at a relationship, a structure, an order. A problem is a picture with a peice missing…The children who take time to see, and feel, and grip the problem, soon find that the answer is there. The ones who get in trouble are the ones who see a problem as an order to start running at top speed from a given starting point, in an unknown direction, to an unknown destination. They dash after the answer before they have considered the problem.” 

He also observes how the pressure of a school setting inhibits learning. He shares about the anxiety he observes when a student is asked a question, or called upon in class. He believes his students often don’t bother to go over their completed work before turning it in because the pressure of working on problems is so great, that it is better to have a wrong answer and be finished than remain under the pressure longer. He sees the praising of a student for right answers equateing ‘right answers’ with ‘good’ and therefore a wrong answer equates with ‘bad’. This creates an environment where right answers are more important than learning.

He shares how he tried to create an environment that valued learning over correct answers, and a classroom without the pressure of performance. 

There were moments in reading this book that brought me back to my own school days. Even though I was a good student who even enjoyed upper grade math, there were times where I could do the calculations without really understanding why I was doing what I was doing. What actually is the difference between sine and cosine anyways? If it made any sense then, it wasn’t in a meaningful enough way that I can still remember it. I can also remember the pressure of taking tests. I often wouldn’t check over my work before turning it in, desiring the weight of stress lifted by being done and having it out of my hands. My goal in school was to ‘do well’ so I could go to a good college, and be successful. Learning was the means more then the ends.

The questions John Holt asked himself in this book became questions I asked my self about my own home. What measure do I use to define education for my children. Does it equate to real life usefulness? How can I remove the pressure of achievement to make way for learning?

This book was the beginning of a thought process and conversation that would later lead to John Holt becoming the “father of unschooling”. It is not so much a book of answers, but of questions, and worth the read. (I also recommend getting the republished version where he included some of his own reflections own his previous edition.)  This book is a great place to start for those wondering why schools hamper learning, or wondering if children can really learn without school. 

“ …true of the mind as well, that the way we use it determines how we can use it. If we use it well, the possibility grows that we may use it even better…we must be aware to the extent to which, in causing children to make poor use of their minds, we may be making their minds less and less useful to them.” -page 125

Holt, J. (2011). How children fail. Da Capo Press Inc.