How Children Learn (Pelican S.) - Softcover

Perhaps the most important point made by How Children Learn is that, left to themselves, young children are capable of grasping new ideas faster than most adults give them credit for (and this includes teachers and psychologists as well as parents). But they have their own Ways of understanding, of working things out; and in most cases this fresh, natural style of thinking is destroyed when the child goes to school and encounters formal methods of learning.
John Holt, himself a teacher and the author cf the highly praised How Children Fail, advocates a fresh approach to the understanding of children - observation. He has spent a great deal of his time just* watching them; being with them and being accepted by them; seeing how they react to different situations.
As he himself says: My aim in writing is not primarily to persuade educators and psychologists to swap new doctrines for old, but to persuade them to look at children, patiently, repeatedly, respectfully, and to hold off making theories and judgements about them until they have in their minds what most of them do not now have - a reasonably accurate model of what children are like.