John Holt
"For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, Because they're scared. I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of Onward! You can do it! What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner."
21 Quotes
"For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, Because they're scared. I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of Onward! You can do it! What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner."
"طوال سنين طويلة، ظللتُ أتساءل: لماذا يتصرف الأطفال الأذكياء بغير ذكاء في المدرسة؟ والإجابة البسيطة هي: لأنهم خائفون. كنتُ أظن أن روح الهزيمة لدى الأطفال لها علاقة بسوء أدائهم الدراسي، لكنني كنتُ أعتقد أنني أستطيع تبديدها بنداءات حماسية مثل "إلى الأمام! أنتم قادرون!". ما أدركته الآن لأول مرة هو الآلية التي يدمر بها الخوف الذكاء، وكيف يؤثر على نظرة الطفل للحياة وتفكيره فيها وتعاطيه معها برمّتها. إذن، لدينا مشكلتان لا مشكلة واحدة: الأولى أن نخلص الأطفال من الخوف، والثانية أن ننتزع منهم عادات التفكير السيئة التي رسخها فيهم خوفهم.
والمدهش حقًا هو مدى انتشار الخوف في المدارس، ولماذا يُصمت عنه إلى هذا الحد. ربما لا يدرك معظم الناس الخوف في الأطفال حين يرونه. فهم يدركون العلامات الفجة للخوف؛ يعرفون المشكلة عندما يتعلق طفل بأمه باكيًا، لكن العلامات الأكثر دقة للخوف تخفى عليهم. هذه العلامات بالذات، في وجوه الأطفال وأصواتهم وإيماءاتهم، وفي حركاتهم وطرق عملهم، هي التي تكشف لي جليًا أن معظم الأطفال في المدرسة خائفون معظم الوقت، وكثير منهم خائفون جدًا. وكالجنود المدربين، يتحكمون في مخاوفهم، يتعايشون معها، ويتكيفون معها. لكن المشكلة، وهنا يكمن فرق جوهري بين المدرسة والحرب، هي أن التكيفات التي يقوم بها الأطفال مع مخاوفهم سلبية تمامًا تقريبًا، ومدمرة لذكائهم وقدراتهم. قد يكون المقاتل الخائف هو الأفضل، لكن المتعلم الخائف هو دائمًا متعلم ضعيف."
John Holt
How Children Fail
"Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school."
"إن أي طفل يستطيع قضاء ساعة أو ساعتين يومياً، أو أكثر إن رغب، مع بالغين يحبهم، مهتمين بالعالم ويحبون الحديث عنه، سيتعلم في معظم الأيام من حديثهم أكثر بكثير مما سيتعلمه في أسبوع كامل من المدرسة."
John Holt
"Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives."
"لا يتسنى لنا الحكم على جوهر البشر، أو حتى مجرد استكشافه، إلا بقدر ما تُلبى حاجاتهم الأساسية، ويتمتعون بالصحة والطمأنينة، وتكون حياتهم غنية بالتنوع، مفعمة بالمتعة والمعنى، مثمرة ومبهجة. غير أن قلة قليلة من البشر، كباراً وصغاراً، من يعيشون هذه الحياة اليوم."
John Holt
Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better
"“Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. Leadership qualities are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”"
"القادة، خلافاً لما يُشاع، ليسوا أولئك الذين تسير خلفهم جموع غفيرة. بل هم من يشقون طريقهم الخاص غير آبهين، ولا حتى ملتفتين، ليروا إن كان أحد يتبعهم. صفات القيادة ليست تلك التي تمكّن المرء من استقطاب الأتباع، بل هي التي تمكّنه من الاستغناء عنهم. وهي تشمل، على الأقل، الشجاعة، والمثابرة، والصبر، وروح الدعابة، والمرونة، وسعة الحيلة، والعناد، وحسّاً مرهفاً بالواقع، والقدرة على الحفاظ على رباطة الجأش ووضوح الذهن حتى في أحلك الظروف. باختصار، القادة الحقيقيون لا يحوّلون الناس إلى أتباع، بل إلى قادة آخرين."
John Holt
Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling
"What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all."
"إن أثمن ما في البيت، كقاعدة لنمو الأطفال في العالم، ليس كونه مدرسة أفضل من المدارس، بل كونه ليس مدرسة على الإطلاق."
John Holt
"Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. Leadership qualities are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders."
"ليس القادة، كما يُشاع غالبًا، أناسًا تسير خلفهم حشود غفيرة. بل هم أولئك الذين يشقون طريقهم الخاص غير آبهين، ولا حتى ناظرين، إن كان أحد يتبعهم. فصفات القيادة ليست تلك التي تمكّن المرء من استقطاب الأتباع، بل هي التي تمكّنه من الاستغناء عنهم. وهي تشمل، على الأقل، الشجاعة، والمثابرة، والصبر، وروح الدعابة، والمرونة، وسعة الحيلة، والعناد، وحسًا واقعيًا ثاقبًا، والقدرة على الاحتفاظ برباطة جأش ووضوح ذهن حتى في أحلك الظروف. باختصار، القادة الحقيقيون لا يحوّلون الناس إلى أتباع، بل إلى قادة آخرين."
John Holt
Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling
"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."
"بما أننا لا نستطيع أن نعلم أي المعارف ستكون الأشد حاجة في المستقبل، فمن العبث محاولة تعليمها مسبقًا. بل ينبغي لنا أن نسعى لتخريج أناس يعشقون التعلم ويتقنونه إلى حد يمكنهم من استيعاب كل ما يلزم تعلمه."
John Holt
"People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experiences they want their children to have."
John Holt
"Books ... rarely if ever talk about what children can make of themselves about the powers that from the day or moment of birth are present in every child."
John Holt
"By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child’, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good"
John Holt
"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."
John Holt
"It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing."
John Holt
"schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat."
John Holt
"Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school."
John Holt
"Over the years, I have noticed that the child who learns quickly is adventurous. She's ready to run risks. She approaches life with arms outspread. She wants to take it all in. She still has the desire of the very young child to make sense out of things. She's not concerned with concealing her ignorance or protecting herself. She's ready to expose herself to disappointment and defeat. She has a certain confidence. She expects to make sense out of things sooner or later. She has a kind of trust."
John Holt
"What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all."
John Holt
"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."
John Holt
"A child whose life is full of the threat and fear of punishment is locked into babyhood. There is no way for him to grow up, to learn to take responsibility for his life and acts. Most important of all, we should not assume that having to yield to the threat of our superior force is good for the child's character. It is never good for anyone's character."
John Holt
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