by John Holt
Among the many things I have learned about children, learned by many, many years of hanging out with them, watching carefully what they do, and thinking about it, is that children are natural learners.
The one thing we can be sure of, or surest of, is that children have a passionate desire to understand as much of the world as they can, even what they cannot see and touch, and as far as possible to acquire some kind of skill, competence, and control in it and over it. Now this desire, this need to understand the world and be able to do things in it, the things the big people do, is so strong that we could properly call it biological. It is every bit as strong as the need for food, for warmth, for shelter, for comfort, for sleep, for love. In fact, I think a strong case could be made that it might be stronger than any of these.
A hungry child, even a tiny baby who experiences hunger as real pain, will stop eating or nursing or drinking if something interesting happens, because that little child wants to see what it is. This curiosity, this desire to make some kind of sense out of things, goes right to the heart of the kind of creatures that we are.
Children are natural learners.
Children are not only extremely good at learning, they are much better at it than we are. As a teacher, it took me a long time to find this out. I was an ingenious and resourceful teacher, clever about thinking up lesson plans and demonstrations and motivating devices and all of that ackamarackus. And I only very slowly and painfully—believe me, painfully—learned that when I started teaching less, the children started learning more.
I can sum up in five to seven words what I eventually learned as a teacher. The seven-word version is: Learning is not the product of teaching. The five-word version is: Teaching does not make learning. As I mentioned before, organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false.
Teaching does not make learning.
Learners make learning. Learners create learning. The reason that this has been forgotten is that the activity of learning has been made into a product called “education”, just as the activity, the discipline, of caring for one’s health has become the product of “medical care”, and the activity of inquiring into the world has become the product of “science”, a specialized thing presumably done only by people with billions of dollars of complicated apparatus. But health is not a product and science is something you and I do every day of our lives. In fact, the word science is synonymous with the word learning.
What do we do when we make learning, when we create learning? Well, we observe, we look, we listen. We touch, taste, smell, manipulate, and sometimes measure or calculate. And then we wonder. We say, “Well, why this?” or “Why is it this way?” or “Did this thing make this thing happen?” or “What made this thing happen?” or “Can we make it happen differently or better?” or “Can we get the Mexican bean beetle off the beans?” or “Can we raise more fruit?” or “Can we fix the washing machine?” or whatever it might be. And then we invent theories, what scientists call hypotheses; we make hunches. We say, “Well, maybe it’s because of this”, or “Perhaps it’s because of that”, or “Maybe if I do this, this will happen.” And then we test these theories or these hypotheses.
We may test them simply by asking questions of people we think know more than we do, or we may test them by further observation. We may say, “Well, I don’t quite know what that thing is, but maybe if I watch it longer I will find out.” Or maybe we do some kind of planned experiment—“Well, I’ll try putting this on the beans and see if it does something to the bean beetles”, or “I’ll try doing something else.” And from these, in various ways, we either find out that our hunch was not so good, or perhaps that it was fairly good, and then we go on, we observe some more, we speculate some more. We ask more questions, we make more theories, we test them.
This process creates learning, and we all do it. it’s not just done by people at MIT or Rensselaer Polytechnic. We do it. And this is exactly what children do. They are hard at work at this process all their waking hours. When they’re not actually eating and sleeping, they’re creating knowledge. They are observing, thinking, speculating, theorizing, testing, and experimenting—all the time—and they’re much better at it than we are. The idea, the very idea, that we can teach small children how to learn has come to me to seem utterly absurd.
Children learn from anything and everything they see.
As I was writing this, there came, as if by wonderful coincidence, a long letter from a parent. At one point she says something that is so good that it could be a title for this book: “Every Time I think of Something to Teach Them They Already Know It.”
Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn; in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions—if they have any—and helping them explore the things they are most interested in, The ways we can do this are simple and easily understood by other people who like children and will take the trouble to pay some attention to what they do and think about what it may mean. In short, what we need to know to help children learn is not obscure, technical, or complicated, and the materials we can use to help them lie ready to hand all around us.
Excerpted from Learning All the Time by John Holt. © 2005. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group (perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.