Some of the points he makes:
- Children are naturally curious. They are eager to understand the world and do the things that adults do. Unfortunately, schools do not always teach things that children find useful, or teach in a way that promotes optimal understanding.
- Children need to develop their own understanding of the world, not just to hear explanations from adults. For example, it's not enough to explain the concept of written words. Children need to be around books and develop their own perceptions and understandings of the concept of written words before they will be ready to learn to read specific words.
- Explaining things to children that they aren't ready to hear or don't want to hear frustrates children rather than contributes to their learning.
- The journey toward increased understanding is not a straight line.Children try doing things in different ways. Even after they have done something right once, they will do it wrong sometimes. However, in time, without being corrected, they will come to consistently do things right. He quotes Professor David Hawkins as saying, "All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand." (pp. 222-223)
Here are a few of the specific things he talks about:
Holt describes how sometimes in a room full of people, he will start playing the cello. After playing a piece, he will invite everyone in the room to try his cello. Usually the children will all try it, but the adults will not, except maybe if they already know how to play the cello. When children try the cello, they mimic Holt's actions, but only after some time do they start to pay attention to how the actions correspond with the sounds, and experiment with changing the actions to change the sounds. In contrast, if adults do play it, they try to figure it out before they even start engaging in actions. Holt says that adults can do this because it is easier for them to make sense of data, to see the relationship between the movement and the sound. He says that for children, the world is full of confusing stimuli, so it is harder for them to make sense of things. Therefore, children gather lots of data, by engaging in actions such as playing the cello. According to Holt, a child "is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. And these are the vital skills of thought which, in our hurry to get him thinking the way we do, we may very well stunt or destroy in the process of 'educating' him" (p. 75).
I have seen teachers make the mistake of ceasing to gather data because they think they have the answer already. They think that they understand a student's question and get engrossed in pontificating their answer without taking in the data that what they are talking about does not actually answer the question that the student has.
Holt says children need time to "mess around" with things in order to develop their own conceptual frameworks. He quotes Seymour Papert, a professor at MIT. Papert was fascinated by gears as a child and played with them a lot. When faced with math concepts in school, he understood them by thinking about what they meant as applied to gears. Thus Papert's "messing around" with gears helped him with learning math in school. Unfortunately, math is sometime taught as an abstraction, which makes it more difficult for students to understand.
Holt says that in schools, the students are the ones who need the most practice talking, but the teachers are the ones who do the most talking. When teachers do hold discussions, they often try to elicit certain answers. I remember teachers who did this. Whether it is a teacher or anyone else, if a person does not seem to want to understand what I think, I prefer not to bother to talk to them. The same goes for kids. They will practice speech when people listen to them. As Holt summarizes it, "we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one -- when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own." (p. 124)
He describes a child doing a puzzle. The child tries to put a piece in the wrong place and it won't go. The child becomes upset. Holt suggests setting the piece aside for now. The child puts some other pieces into place and then easily finds the spot for the piece that had caused trouble before. What teachers need to learn from this is that there are times when a lesson can't be learned, and rather than force it, they should set it aside. The child will learn it better later, when he is ready to learn it.
Holt says that children go through cycles of courage and fear. When getting used to being in a swimming pool, sometimes they want an adult to hold them tightly, while other times they want to jump right in. If we give them reassurance when they seek it, they will rapidly learn to do many brave things. On the other hand, if we push them to do things they are afraid to do, they will become timid and will not learn as fast.
Holt has experienced much opposition to his ideas. Holt addresses the arguments against his views throughout the book. One of the main themes of those who disagree with him is that if children are allowed to direct their own learning, they won't learn the things they need to learn. To counter this, Holt gives some examples of how children get interested in something and pursuing that interest leads them to learn many things. In one example, a child read an article on scuba diving which sparked his interest, and that led to further reading about diving for historic objects, which led to interest in and study of archeology and ancient history. In another example, taken from My Country School Diary by Julia Weber, students wondered about why wool clothing shrunk. That led them to look at fabrics under a microscope, to spin and weave cloth, and to calculate how many hours of work it would take to make cloth. They calculated the area of different shapes of cloth. They visited a factory where cloth was made, and studied the history of labor conditions and the impact of factories on the community.
Holt also discusses his methods. He believes that while experimental methods have their place, they are not the only way to discover truth, and relying on experiments alone will result in a limited understanding of the world. He points out that during experiments, children feel tense and try to behave as the experimenter wants them to. He believes that he learns more about children by observing them in their everyday lives.
I went through the education of a social scientist, and was taught about how scientific experiments are the only way to understand things, how otherwise we will be affected by our own pre-conceived ideas and by the un-representativeness of our sample. I accepted that way of thinking when it was taught to me, but over time, I've come to see things more the way Holt does. I do see how bias can be present in personal observation, and I do think that there are times when the experimental method is most effective. However, sometimes scientists don't realize that bias is also present in the experimental method. Also, I've found that experimenters want to classify human thoughts into neat little categories, but if you listen to a thought for all that it is, it usually contains more than the little pre-determined box indicates.
