## Highlights "Blame" and "guilt" are crybaby words. Let's get them out of our talk about education. Let's use instead the word "responsible." <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Let's have schools and teachers begin to hold themselves responsible for the results of what they do.</mark> — location: 52 ^ref-12241 --- Finally, we will find out once more what by now we should have learned: that many or most children repeating a grade do no better the second time through than they did the first, if even as well. Why should they? If a certain kind of teaching failed to produce learning the first time, why will it suddenly produce it the second time? — location: 66 ^ref-48904 --- Of the five they found, two struck me as crucial: (1) if the students did not learn, the schools did not blame them, or their families, backgrounds, neighborhoods, attitudes, nervous systems, or whatever. They did not alibi. They took full responsibility for the results or non-results of their work. (2) When something they were doing in the class did not work, they stopped doing it, and tried to do something else. They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children. — location: 78 ^ref-28101 --- There may be a connection here with producer-thinker strategies. We used the word producer to describe the student who was only interested in getting right answers, and who made more or less uncritical use of rules and formulae to get them; we called thinker the student who tried to think about the meaning, the reality, of whatever it was he was working on. A student who jumps at the right answer and misses often falls back into defeatism and despair because he doesn't know what else to do. The thinker is more willing to plug on. — location: 97 ^ref-39046 --- I thought I knew how to deal with the problem: make the work interesting and the classroom a lively and enthusiastic place. It was, too, many of these failing students actually liked my classes. Overcome children's fear of saying what they don't understand, and keep explaining until they do understand. Keep a steady and resolute pressure on them. These things I did. Result? The good students stayed good, and some may have got better; but the bad students stayed bad, and some of them seemed to get worse. — location: 137 ^ref-10011 --- Thus the problem is not to get students to ask us what they don't know; the problem is to make them aware of the difference between what they know and what they don't. — location: 163 ^ref-27770 --- I see a lot of this one-way, don't-look-back-it's-too awful strategy among students. Emily in particular has shown instances of it so striking that I would like you to know about them. — location: 199 ^ref-8188 --- She was perfectly ready to accept the fact that she had posted a joke that was meaningless. The possibility that she had made a mistake, and that the real joke was on the other side, did not occur to her. — location: 211 ^ref-4904 --- The mumble strategy is particularly effective in language classes. In my French classes, the students used to work it on me, without my knowing what was going on. It is particularly effective with a teacher who is finicky about accents and proud of his own. To get such a teacher to answer his own questions is a cinch. Just make some mumbled, garbled, hideously un-French answer, and the teacher, with a shudder, will give the correct answer in elegant French. The student will have to repeat it after him, but by that time, he is out of the worst danger. — location: 247 ^ref-46500 --- Game theorists have a name for the strategy, which maximizes your chances of winning and minimizes your losses if you should lose. They call it minimax. Kids are expert at finding such strategies. They can always find ways to hedge, to cover their bets. — location: 252 ^ref-44280 --- I find myself coming to realize that what hampers their thinking, what drives them into these narrow and defensive strategies, is a feeling that they must please the grownups at all costs. — location: 319 ^ref-30373 --- Yon can't find out what a child does in class by looking at him only when he is called on. You have to watch him for long stretches of time without his knowing it. — location: 357 ^ref-18046 --- There should be more situations in which two experienced teachers share the same class, teaching and observing the same group of kids, thinking, and talking to each other, about what they see and hear. Schools can't afford to support this; they can barely pay the one teacher in each class. I should think foundations might be willing to support this kind of work. — location: 387 ^ref-52205 --- If we look at children only to see whether they are doing what we want or don't want them to do, we are likely to miss all the things about them that are the most interesting and important. This is one reason why so many classroom teachers, even after years of experience, understand so little about the real nature of children. — location: 404 ^ref-14258 --- They had to teach me before I could begin to teach them. — location: 412 ^ref-976 --- For children, the central business of school is not learning, whatever this vague word means; it is getting these daily tasks done, or at least out of the way, with a minimum of effort and unpleasantness. Each task is an end in itself. — location: 438 ^ref-6450 --- The girl had learned how to make me do her work for her, just as she had learned to make all her previous teachers do the same thing. If I wouldn't tell her the answers, very well, she would just let me question her right up to them. — location: 449 ^ref-40750 --- The trouble was that I was asking too many questions. In time I learned to shut up and stop asking questions, stop constantly trying to find out how much people understood. We have to let learners decide when they want to ask questions. It often takes them a long time even to find out what questions they want to ask. It is not the teacher's proper task to be constantly testing and checking the understanding of the learner. That's the learner's task, and only the learner can do it. — location: 471 ^ref-13124 --- Here is where Twenty Questions, the card game, the balance beam, all come in handy. The scientist who asks a question of nature—i.e., performs an experiment—tries to ask one such that he will gain information whichever way his experiment comes out, and will have an idea of what to do next. He asks his questions with a purpose. This is a subtle art. Can fifth-graders learn some of it? — location: 500 ^ref-34809 --- A man wrote us a letter at Growing Without Schooling telling about the spelling strategy he used at school. When asked to spell a word that he was not one hundred percent sure of, he simply stood up—and said nothing. No guesses, no questions—just dead silence. The children, who would almost certainly have laughed at his wrong guesses, admired his silence. Apparently he didn't get into any trouble over this, since his teachers did not interpret his silence as defiance. It was a perfect school strategy. — location: 612 ^ref-6137 --- They still cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes answer. This, of course, is the result of the miseducation in which "right answers" are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say, "Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?" and I say yes, they cheer; if I say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of information in either case. — location: 635 ^ref-15714 --- With the possible exception of economics, education is probably the largest field of human activity in which there is almost no connection between theory and experience, in which people rarely test theories to see if they work and reject or change them if they don't. — location: 647 ^ref-46753 --- We, and not math, or reading, or spelling, or history, were the problem that the children had designed their strategies to cope with. — location: 653 ^ref-46878 --- This is the most important task of a teacher, certainly of younger children—to make or make accessible a part of the world or of human experience which is as interesting, exciting, meaningful, transparent, and emotionally safe as possible. — location: 657 ^ref-19159 --- What I noticed at the time, when the school year began, was that the children, eager to put themselves one up with me and their classmates one down, were great tattletales, always running up to me saying, "Mr. Holt, so-and-so said or did such- and-such." I hated this, couldn't stand it. So when children ran up with these stories I would look them in the eye and say in a kind but firm voice, "Mind your own business." They were astonished. Their mouths fell open. I often had to say it twice: "Mind your own business." I might then add something like this: "Thank you for telling me, I appreciate your wanting to help, but (pointing to eyes) I can see, (and to ears) I can hear, and just with what I can see and hear I have plenty to keep me occupied. So unless someone is really hurt or in physical danger, hanging out the window holding on by three fingers (we were on the third floor), I don't want to hear about it." The children would walk away puzzled. — location: 686 ^ref-34318 --- I invented the Q. I explained to the class why I thought I needed this invention, said that I liked to give them plenty of chances to talk, but that sometimes the talk grew too loud, and sometimes I needed quiet so that I could tell or explain something. So when I wanted quiet I would write a capital Q in a corner ·of the blackboard. When it was up, the standard school rule went into effect: no talking unless you raise your hand and get permission. On a big piece of cardboard I wrote down the rule: "When the Q is on the board, there shall be no talking except by those who have raised their hand and had permission." That was the Q sentence. If children talked when the Q was on the board, I put a mark opposite their names; this was called, "Giving them a Q." The penalty was that when recess came, for every Q you had you had to write down the Q sentence once before you could go off and play. Three Q's, three sentences. Later I made the sentence a bit shorter, as I didn't want to use up too much of the children's recess time, partly because I thought it was very important to them, and partly because the true value of the Q penalty was its nuisance value, in having to do it at all, in having to spend time, if only a minute, writing down some fool sentence when everyone else was rushing out into the play yard and getting things organized. A minute of this writing was just as effective a deterrent as five minutes would have been, maybe more so. — location: 712 ^ref-60559 --- It was the children's way of making that Q theirs as well as mine, and because it was theirs as well as mine, they respected it. — location: 732 ^ref-9871 --- What some of these kids need is the experience of doing something really well--so well that they know themselves, without having to be told, that they have done it well. — location: 773 ^ref-964 --- Children who undertake to do things, like my five-year-old friend Vita who is beginning the very serious study of the violin, do not think in terms of success and failure but of effort and adventure. It is only when pleasing adults become important that the sharp line between success and failure appears. — location: 797 ^ref-45924 --- One thing I have discovered is that there is a peculiar kind of relief, a lessening of tension, when you make a mistake. For when you make one, you no longer have to worry about whether you are going to make one. Walking a tightrope, you worry about falling off; once fallen off, you don't have to worry. Children, for whom making mistakes is acutely painful, are therefore under great tension when doing something correctly. Worrying about the mistakes they might make is as bad as--no, worse than-worrying about the mistakes they have made. — location: 829 ^ref-30315 --- When the paper was in, the tension was ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry, it didn't contain the agonizing element of choice, there was nothing more they could do about it. — location: 853 ^ref-64342 --- When we give children long lists of arithmetic problems to do in school, hoping to create confidence, security, certainty, we usually do quite the opposite, create boredom, anxiety, less and less sharpness of attention, and so, more and more mistakes, and so in turn, more and more fear of making mistakes. — location: 858 ^ref-21650 --- Lore Rasmussen, who became a good friend of Bill's and mine after this book first came out, worked out in her math classes a way in which children could and did get security from written work. She invented many varied and ingenious worksheets (many now commercially available), each one dealing with a particular aspect of math or arithmetic — location: 860 ^ref-27094 --- But most homework, when it is not pure busywork to fill up the children's time, is designed to convince the teacher, not the children, that they know something. And so it rarely does good, and usually does harm. — location: 870 ^ref-13967 --- Note the danger of using a child's concept of himself to get him to do good work. We say "You are the kind of sensible, smart, good, etc., etc. boy or girl who can easily do this problem, if you try." But if the work fails, so does the concept. If he can't do the problem, no matter how hard he tries, then, clearly, he is not sensible, smart, or good. — location: 901 ^ref-5993 --- If, when Johnny does good work, we make him feel "good," may we not, without intending it, be making him feel "bad" when he does bad work? — location: 906 ^ref-32949 --- Do children really need so much praise? When a child, after a long struggle, finally does the cube puzzle, does he need to be told that he has done well? Doesn't he know, without being told, that he has accomplished something? In fact, when we praise him, are we not perhaps horning in on his accomplishment, stealing a little of his glory, edging our way into the limelight, praising ourselves for having helped to turn out such a smart child? — location: 907 ^ref-9298 --- Years ago I visited an adventure playground in Holland Park in London. The playground was full of trees to climb, ropes to swing on, and other "dangerous" stuff. I asked the young people in charge whether many children got hurt there. They said, "No, not since we told the adults that they couldn't come in." — location: 955 ^ref-18435 --- It is not the ratio of children to adults in the group, but the total number of children that seems to determine how anxious are the adults. In this respect a group of thirty children attended by five adults is not at all like a group of six children attended by one adult, for this reason, that in the large group every one of the five adults worries about all thirty of the children. The bigger the group, the more the worry, and no matter how many adults there may be? — location: 998 ^ref-16604 --- <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense</mark>. — location: 1017 ^ref-56900 --- anything at all, that would, if only for a moment, gain them the approval of their fellows. For their security they had nothing but each other, and they were so anxious that they had almost no security to give. Every time one of them laughed at another's joke, his laughter was almost instantly cut short by the need to do something that would make the other laugh at him. Their approval of each other almost instantly soured into jealousy. What did these boys have to nourish their self-respect and self-esteem besides the short-lived and uneasy approval they gave each other? Only the palpable disapproval of everyone else around them, disapproval close to fear. If you can't make people like you, it — location: 1247 ^ref-13117 --- or less the class screwball. Her schoolwork is very — location: 1263 ^ref-28187 --- Children who depend heavily on adult approval may decide that, if they can't have total success, their next-best bet is to have total failure. — location: 1280 ^ref-44475 --- A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame, disgrace, a crime. — location: 1318 ^ref-1235 --- So, to keep him in his place, to please the school and his parents, I have to make him fearful again. The freedom from fear that I try to give with one hand I almost instantly take away with the other. What sense does this make? — location: 1503 ^ref-13664 --- What really makes school hard for thinkers is not just that teachers say so much that doesn't make sense, but that they say it in exactly the way they say things that are sensible, so that the child comes to feel--as he is intended to-that when he doesn't understand it is his fault. — location: 1565 ^ref-25194 --- It is only when other people, adults, start trying to control their learning and force their understanding that they begin to worry about not understanding, because they know that if they don't understand, sooner or later they are going to be in some kind of trouble with those adults. — location: 1576 ^ref-43100 --- Why is the greenness of a ball different from the ball ness of a ball? I don't feel the difference. They are both ways of saying something about the object. We tell children that the distinction between one part of speech and another is a matter of meaning, when it really has to do with the way we fit them into sentences. — location: 1741 ^ref-51812 --- his means to the end of clearer thinking has become an end in itself, just part of the ritual mumbo-jumbo you have to go through on your answer hunt. — location: 1811 ^ref-36385 --- Last fall, about November, I gave the afternoon section some problems. I said, "You have never seen problems like these, you don't know how to do them, and I don't care whether you get them right or not. I just want to see how you go about trying to do them." — location: 1814 ^ref-30501 --- The inventors of clever teaching ideas tend to think that if one good teaching idea helps to make some learning happen, a hundred good ideas will make a hundred times as much learning happen. Not so. A hundred good ideas may stop the learning altogether. — location: 1893 ^ref-14696 --- It took me a long time to learn, as a classroom teacher, that on the days when I came to class just bursting with some great teaching idea, good things rarely happened. The children, with their great quickness and keenness of perception, would sense that there was something "funny," wrong, about me. Instead of being a forty-year-old human being in a room full of ten-year-old human beings, I was now a "scientist" in a room full of laboratory animals. I was no longer in the class to talk about things that interested me, or them, or to enjoy what I and they were doing, but to try something out on them. — location: 1896 ^ref-64729 --- when Learning happens, the school and teachers take the credit; when it doesn't, the students get the blame. The words change a little, from bad and stupid to "culturally disadvantaged" and "learning disabled." The idea remains the same. Only when the results are good will schools and teachers accept the responsibility for what they do. — location: 1954 ^ref-61120 --- After all, men invented mathematical symbols to save the trouble of writing things out the long way, so what I am doing in class is both logically and historically correct. No symbol "means" anything until we decide and agree to let it mean something; so why not let children feel that they are in on this decision? — location: 2009 ^ref-2749 --- It may help to have in our minds a picture of what we mean by understanding. I feel I understand something if I can do some, at least, of the following: (1) state it in my own words; (2) give examples of it; (3) recognize it in various guises and circumstances; (4) see connections between it and other facts or ideas; (5) make use of it in various ways; (6) foresee some of its consequences; (7) state its opposite or converse. — location: 2081 ^ref-63475 --- I then said, "What is 2 X 100?" She said, "200." I asked for 2 x 90. 180. 2 x 80? (Pause) 160. 2 X 76? 432. 2 x 70? 140. 2 x 80? 160. 2 x 76? 432. 2 x 100? 200. 2 X 200? 400. 2 X 76? 432 ... Here she stopped, looked at me searchingly, and then said, "Now wait a minute." She ran to get pencil and paper, saying, "This doesn't make sense, I'm going to figure this out." On the paper, she worked out that 2 X 76 was 152. Something very important happened when she said, "Now wait a minute." She was seeing, perhaps for the first time, that we can ask of an answer to a problem, not just " Is it right?" or " Is it wrong?" but "Is it sensible?" — location: 2143 ^ref-50895 --- What she needs is a broom to sweep out her mind. She has so much junk in there, and her filing systems are in such a mess, that she never can find anything, and the file drawers and old trunks must be emptied out before they can be put into any kind of order. If she could only forget, completely, about nine tenths of the facts and rules she has all mixed up in her head, she might begin to learn something. — location: 2194 ^ref-63186 --- All she knew was that she had been told to start doing something and didn't know what to do. She was wholly incapable of analyzing the instructions, finding out what part of them made sense and what did not, where her knowledge ended and her ignorance began. — location: 2204 ^ref-59038 --- the behavior of inanimate objects is consistent and reliable, rather than whimsical and unpredictable. — location: 2222 ^ref-24390 --- What helped her was the fact that, certainly compared with most school classes, our class was a lively, interesting, cooperative, and generally unthreatening place. — location: 2245 ^ref-27106 --- When children are doing concrete operations like this, doing things that they feel are sensible, getting answers by themselves, answers that they can be sure are right, there is much to be said for letting them use a cumbersome method until they feel thoroughly secure in it, before suggesting the possibility that there may be an easier way. It is often said that children find security in drill, in repetitive work. — location: 2282 ^ref-8815 --- Seymour Papert, in Mindstorms (Basic Books, 1980 — location: 2292 ^ref-43786 --- Children who have been led up to answers by teachers' questions are later helpless unless they can remember the questions, or ask themselves similar questions, and this is exactly what they cannot do. The only answer that really sticks in a child's mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself. — location: 2356 ^ref-9581 --- This property, that a group of five objects may be split up into a group of three objects and another of two objects, is not a human invention but a fact of nature. The statement 3 + 2 = 5 is only one of several ways to write and talk about this fact of nature. — location: 2382 ^ref-55204 --- With thought, practice, and luck we should be able to devise problems that children can do in ways which, being their own, will be of use to them. — location: 2468 ^ref-12863 --- we will have to avoid the difficult temptation of showing slow students the wheel so that they may more quickly get to work on the airplanes. — location: 2479 ^ref-36197 --- The only way to get new ideas and ways of teaching into classrooms is to say to teachers, "Here is an idea we think you might like, and if--and only if--you do, you might think about using some of it in your work with the children." — location: 2510 ^ref-17287 --- I think the idea of trying to be an advisor or resource person for the school was a mistake. It was not clever materials, or puzzles, or teaching ideas that had made my class a better place for the children, where they had learned more than they had learned before, but the fact that it was a different kind of human situation. — location: 2617 ^ref-4090 --- (1) Children do not need to be "taught" in order to learn; they will learn a great deal, and probably learn best, without being taught. (2) Children are enormously interested in our adult world and what we do there. (3) Children learn best when the things they learn are embedded in a context of real Life, are part of what George Dennison, in The Lives of Children, called "the continuum of experience." (4) Children learn best when their learning is connected with an immediate and serious purpose. — location: 2628 ^ref-14888 --- the more we can make it possible for children to see how we use numbers, and to use them as we use them, the better. — location: 2634 ^ref-30771 --- Children are interested in themselves, their own bodies, their growth, quickness, and strength. In What Do I Do Monday? I suggested a whole range of experiments that children might do to measure their own size, strength, and speed, and how these things change over time and vary with different conditions. Thus children might measure their own respiration and pulse rate, then exercise violently for a while, then measure their breathing and pulse rate again, then measure it at intervals to see how long it takes it to get down to normal. — location: 2647 ^ref-5842 --- the means to an end becomes an end in itself. I had on my hands this three-mistake rule meant to serve the ends of careful work and neat compositions. By applying it rigidly was I getting more careful work and neater compositions? No; I was getting a child who was so worried about having to recopy her paper that she could not concentrate on doing it, — location: 2694 ^ref-21268 --- It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, non-school parts of our lives. — location: 2727 ^ref-32339 --- What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a proof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it. — location: 2726 ^ref-3858 --- With few exceptions, schools and school people do not value courage in children. Not understanding it, and having very little of it themselves, they fear it, and do all they can to stamp it out. They think that children who are brave will be hard to handle, rebellious, defiant, and that children who are scared will be easy to control. — location: 2750 ^ref-26032 --- How can we foster a joyous, alert, wholehearted participation in life if we build all our schooling around the holiness of getting "right answers"? — location: 2845 ^ref-7443 --- Teachers, not understanding that children like to learn things, believing that learning is painful (because it is for them), every so often try to make it "fun" by taking some tiny task, in this case recognizing the sound of the C, and making it the center of some elaborate game. Teachers' magazines are full of such suggestions. These games take an enormous amount of time to organize and carry out--and so fill up the school day, bring the class just that much closer to that distant and longed-for closing bell. But they also complicate and confuse the learning situation. In electronics terms, they bury the signal (whatever the teacher is trying to get across) in a lot of noise. For the children in this particular class, what was the point of this activity? To march around the room? To touch your toes? To listen to the music? How could they apply their minds to a task when they hardly knew what it was? — location: 2917 ^ref-48031 --- Then I had what seemed at the time like a bright idea. I thought if I could get her to think about what she had written, she would see that some of her answers were more reasonable than others, and thus the beginnings of an error-noticing, nonsense-eliminating device might take root in her mind. I gave her all three papers, and asked her, since they did not agree, to compare her answers, check with a those she felt sure were right, with an X those she felt sure were wrong, and with a ? those she wasn't sure of one way or the other. — location: 2961 ^ref-34572 --- test, to find out what the students knew about — location: 3007 ^ref-41752 --- Subject peoples both appease their rulers and satisfy some part of their desire for human dignity by putting on a mask, by acting more stupid and incompetent than they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies. — location: 3092 ^ref-56549 --- Children are subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail. Do they not, to some extent, escape and frustrate the relentless, insatiable pressure of their elders by withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from the scene? — location: 3095 ^ref-60886 --- Last year, thinking that self- consciousness and embarrassment might be silencing the children, I put a question box in the classroom, and said that I would answer any questions they put into it. In four months I got one question--"How long does a bear live?" While I was talking about the life span of bears and other creatures, one child said impatiently, "Come on, get to the point." The expressions on the children's faces seemed to say, "You've got us here in school; now make us do whatever it is that you want us to do." — location: 3114 ^ref-58978 --- A child is most intelligent when the reality before him arouses in him a high degree of attention, interest, concentration, involvement--in short, when he cares most about what he is doing. — location: 3135 ^ref-24617 --- we are not honest about ourselves, our own fears, limitations, weaknesses, prejudices, motives. We present ourselves to children as if we were gods, all-knowing, all-powerful, always rational, always just, always right. This is worse than any lie we could tell about ourselves. — location: 3319 ^ref-39725 --- Why can't we say to children what I used to say to fifth-graders who got sore at me, "The law says you have to go to school; it doesn't say you have to like it, and it doesn't say you have to like me either." This might make school more bearable for many children. — location: 3351 ^ref-56929 --- The workers in a project called Street corner Research, in Cambridge, Mass., have found that <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">nothing more than the opportunity to talk openly and freely about themselves and their lives, to people who would listen without judging, and who were interested in them as human beings rather than as problems to be solved or disposed of, has totally remade the lives and personalities of a number of confirmed and seemingly hopeless juvenile delinquents</mark>. — location: 3360 ^ref-24077 --- 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 well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned. — location: 3432 ^ref-49247 --- The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. — location: 3471 ^ref-49893 --- <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">The alternative--I can see no other--is to have schools and classrooms in which each child in his own way can satisfy his curiosity, develop his abilities and talents, pursue his interests, and from the adults and older children around him get a glimpse of the great variety and richness of life. In short, the school should be a great smorgasbord of intellectual, artistic, creative, and athletic activities from which each child could take whatever he wanted, and as much as he wanted, or as little.</mark> — location: 3480 ^ref-15908 ---