Rating: 
Summary: Great viewpoint on children
Review: I have been homeschooling my 6 children for over 10 years. This is one of the best books on education that I've read.Holt really just advocates that we treat children with respect, and allow them some self determinism in their own education. It is a radical viewpoint, unfortunately - he really strips away many of the false notions regarding education that the teacher's colleges seem to promote - but I think it's a sane viewpoint, all the same. Children raised and educated this way are surely more whole, stable, self-confident and able. The book is a series of essays, which is a great format for this kind of material. I found it really compelling reading. While I don't agree with absolutely everything in this book (he recommends that we have children guess at word meanings, rather than having them use a dictionary, which I strongly disagree with), almost everything else he says rings true for me. Highly recommmended!
Rating:
Summary: Great Insight
Review: I learned a alot about the difference in learning styles by reading this book. It helped tune me in to what to look for and to expect in the classroom. It also made me aware of the reasons that more families are choosing to homeschool. Thank you for the information.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting
Review: I was assigned this book within my Education class at Macon State college. This book for me shifted back and forth between interesting and boring. Simply because it was very detailed at times and very repetetive at times. It really started getting better when I got to the section "how school's fail". I already work in the school system as a paraprofessional and I see a lot of what Holt talks about. I also agree with him that sometimes you have to slow down to a child's pace and back up to where the child is in order to bring them up. You can't just expect them to catch up with the same work the other children are keeping up with. The idea with the balance beam experiment was good. It really gave the children something to think about. Children need to learn to think for themselves and not have everything just told to them. The Cuisenaire rods seemed like a good idea at a point, but Holt just went into too much detail and repetition in the book with them. It made it hard to read much of those sections.
Rating: 
Summary: True to life
Review: I was homeschooled all the way through high school. Although my parents did have an excellent curriculum, they simply didn't bother to make me read literature, great works, or write long essays. Holt asserts that given freedom - as I was - youngsters will naturally explore and educate themselves.
This has proven to be absolutely true. In high school, I read Shakespeare, Milton, Boswell - for fun. I also read many works on science, history, and even math. Like many homeschoolers, this has paid off in ways other than education and love of learning - I'm a National Merit Scholar attending college for free.
John Holt's idea of unshackling children from the bonds of boring, repetitive lessons works in real life. Furthermore, this book is well-written, adopting a diary-entry approach to let the teacher's discoveries come in the context of a story. I found his definition of intelligence, as an exploring attitude to life (to oversimply a bit), to be inspiring. His book "How Children Learn" is basically more of same. You wouldn't regret reading it, but of the two, this is the essential one.
Rating:
Summary: Essential for anyone working with children
Review: I was struggling to teach seventh grade reading when I came across this book. It had been mentioned in a William Gaddis essay, so I picked it up and I can honestly say that it's changed the way I look at the world. Like all great books, it says things that seem to always have been under your nose, that always bothered you a little, and says them with such simplicity that you're not sure how you could have missed them. Once Holt's ideas are in your head I assure you that they'll become part of your mental model of the way things work: every time I was in front of my classroom I could see my students reading me for answers, and engaging in a hundred games and subterfuges based on the anxiety caused by the way my school forced me to run things - along, of course, with what I had always assumed education had to be. It bothers me that this book is given to teachers who agree with its observations but declare that the solution is not to create the sort of environment that Holt recommends, but to keep schools exactly the same and just make it harder for kids to fake the answers; to engage in a battle of wits to force them to think; and provide all sorts of unrelated incentives to get the students to try their hardest. This book forced me to look at how phony most of my teaching was, and I am confident that the solution does not involve putting a slightly new face to the phoniness.
Rating:
Summary: Essential for anyone working with children
Review: I was struggling to teach seventh grade reading when I came across this book. It had been mentioned in a William Gaddis essay, so I picked it up and I can honestly say that it's changed the way I look at the world. Like all great books, it says things that seem to always have been under your nose, that always bothered you a little, and says them with such simplicity that you're not sure how you could have missed them. Once Holt's ideas are in your head I assure you that they'll become part of your mental model of the way things work: every time I was in front of my classroom I could see my students reading me for answers, and engaging in a hundred games and subterfuges based on the anxiety caused by the way my school forced me to run things - along, of course, with what I had always assumed education had to be. It bothers me that this book is given to teachers who agree with its observations but declare that the solution is not to create the sort of environment that Holt recommends, but to keep schools exactly the same and just make it harder for kids to fake the answers; to engage in a battle of wits to force them to think; and provide all sorts of unrelated incentives to get the students to try their hardest. This book forced me to look at how phony most of my teaching was, and I am confident that the solution does not involve putting a slightly new face to the phoniness.
Rating:
Summary: A compassionate critique
Review: If you can't homeschool your children, pray that they have a teacher like John Holt. He seems so free from ego, that he is able to write about his own mistakes and shortcomings as a teacher, even while clearly presenting the shortcomings of the system. He is so compassionate, and writes from practical experience, about specific children, classes and events that are exemplary. I felt like giving some of these children hugs, before I remembered that they must be adults with their own kids by now. The positive side is that he elucidates the alternative to current school education, and how that will work better for the children. Meanwhile the ominous trends he noted in 1983 are even more in evidence now in election year 2000.
Rating:
Summary: How the children really fail?
Review: The book How Children Fail by John Holt is a really good book to compare and contrast education in the 1960's and 2004. Students can read and respond to the ideas and opinions about education on this book. This book has also shown me that most of all the teachers actually do care about students'. I found out that what Holt says is true in many cases. Holt says that all teachers teach students the same way and some students learn but not the other students because the teacher doesn't know how to teach them the right way. After reading this book, I asked myself a question: why do the teachers let themselves get tapped by the same tricks they used with their teachers when they were going to school?
Rating:
Summary: how children fail
Review: The book how children fail reminded me of my own childhood, during my elementary school year. Yes, I too wanted to get the right answer to please my teacher and not to be the dummy in the eyes of the other students in order for them to have a laugh for the day. The teacher did suppress my indiviualism due to forcing me to have a lack of courage. My courage was often mistaken as misbehavior, and I was discouraged to speak my mind. I was taught to only speak in order to appease the teacher. I truly disliked control and teachers always had control over everything in class, decision making, recess, lunch, field trips etc. I could remember in my fifth grade class. I had a elderly teacher and my lessons in school was a big gap of not learning. All she was concerned with was retirement and not one intervened with the quality of our education. I respect the idea of a second teacher in the classroom observing the children responses to the lesson being giving to them. A second teacher evaluates how, why and when to encourage a child in regards to their learning capablities and/or interest. I plan to read the book more than once in order to gain a more knowlegde in regards to John Holt's observations. And I think it would be a good idea for other active teachers to also read how children fail, too.
Rating:
Summary: "how teachers fail" would be better...
Review: This book should be required reading for all education students. It won't show you how to be a good teacher, but it will show you how to be a bad one. John Holt's careful and honest examination of the utter dysfunction that typifies classrooms to this very day, had it been digested by the education Establishment, might have helped save countless lives. It is often treated as axiomatic that what teachers do to students, whether it is facilitating, teaching, socializing, or conditioning, is ultimately for the students' benefit. Alas, many of our children learn the hard way that this is not the case; most often, teachers do far more harm than good. It is a tragedy of immense proportion that these people cloak their monstrous misdeeds behind a public perception of teaching as a noble, selfless, underpaid profession. Most teachers are despicable villians trapped in their own closed minds, petty fascists who relish their authority over helpless children and who secretly (or not-so-secretly) regard learning with fear and contempt. Holt's notes on his own experience as a teacher will remind those of you who forgot, or, possibly, enlighten those of you who were duped. This atrocity must be stopped. But please, don't hurt the teachers. They're victims too.
| 
