Why? Why should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant, imaginative, analytical, in a word, intelligent, come into the class-room and, as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt? If you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports, and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than they are at other times. It was going as this normally does-a large proportion were absolutely terrible at it.

In 1958, John Holt was trying to teach math, writing, and French to a class of ten-year-olds. But by any standard other than comparing them to other schoolchildren, they universally fail. They care so deeply that they have nightmares about missing class that last well into adulthood. Which is not to say that children don’t try, or don’t care. In most classrooms, children are absolutely forbidden from leaving to go get a snack because they would always claim to get hungry and they would never come back. Everybody fails at least this hard.)Īs an adult, when I’m in the middle of researching something, and I get hungry, I get up, go to the kitchen, get a snack, come back, and keep researching. Yet there are books I read in school (good books, written to be enjoyed!) where I now couldn’t tell you the main character’s name. Through involuntary cultural osmosis, I could probably pass a test on the characters, plot, and setting of Twilight, despite having never read any of the books or watched any of the movies. Yet I quickly learned to navigate the New York City Subway. They then struggle to match this vocabulary acquisition rate over their next ten years, despite expert attention, a wealth of resources, personal encouragement, and even prizes.Īfter weeks of trying, my teacher gave up on getting me to correctly label the countries and capitals in a map of South America. In their first five years, kids learn to understand 25,000 words, even if nobody is actively helping them, at the same time as they’re learning most of what they’ll ever know about physics, psychology, and how to pilot a human body.

But the much more dramatic contrast is between learning in school and learning in any other context.

We call out individual schools and school systems as bad. We call out individual children as failing.

Seriously, they’re terrible at it, and nobody ever calls them out as a group. Why are all children so bad at learning in school?

How Children Fail by John C. Holt