![How Children Fail [SLIDES]](http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/How-Children-Fail-Quote-38-1080x675.png)
by Scott McLeod | Dec 16, 2024 | Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Slides |
I have read or revisited a number of education books in recent years as I’ve been visiting innovative, deeper learning schools all around the world. I could recommend many, but I keep returning to How Children Fail by John Holt. Below are 52 quotes from the book (click on the arrows to move through the album). I invite you to dive deep into – and reflect upon – each of these and their relevance to children and schooling today. Remember that Holt wrote all of this in 1964…
Individual slides are available for download here.
Thoughts?
by Scott McLeod | Nov 14, 2024 | Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, Slides |
I don’t know any teachers who have forgotten their why. But I know a bunch who have lost it because of schools, policymakers, and administrators.
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by Scott McLeod | Dec 14, 2023 | Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, Slides |
When we subject young people to 13 years of ‘just tell me what to do’ schooling that emphasizes giving teachers ‘the right answer’ instead of exploration and risk-taking, we shouldn’t be surprised that their ‘curiosity in learning’ has been extinguished.
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by Scott McLeod | Oct 18, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Slides |
Schools give every encouragement to producers, the kids whose idea is to get “right answers” by any and all means. In a system that runs on “right answers,” they can hardly help it. And these schools are often very discouraging places for thinkers. (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 40)
by Scott McLeod | Oct 17, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Slides |
What hampers their thinking, what drives them into these narrow and defensive strategies, is a feeling that they must please the grownups at all costs. The really able thinkers in our class turn out to be, without exception, children who don’t feel so strongly the need to please grownups. Some of them are good students, some not so good; but good or not, they don’t work to please us, but to please themselves. (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 29)
by Scott McLeod | Oct 15, 2023 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Slides |
[We used the word producer to describe the student who was only interested in getting right answers, and who made more or less uncritical use of rules and formulae to get them; we called thinker the student who tried to think about the meaning, the reality, of whatever it was he was working on.] (Holt, How Children Fail, pp. 11-12)
![Doubling down on dehumanizing practices [SLIDE]](http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Doubling-down-on-dehumanizing-practices-1080x675.jpg)
by Scott McLeod | Jul 31, 2023 | Leadership and Vision, Slides |
Doubling down on dehumanizing practices won’t help you reclaim student (or educator) ‘misbehavior.’
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by Scott McLeod | Feb 25, 2022 | Learning and Teaching, Slides |
Covering content and preparing students for life success are not the same thing.
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by Scott McLeod | Jan 13, 2022 | Leadership and Vision, Slides, Student Agency and Voice |
“It’s ironic that a shift away from a focus on preparation (take Algebra 1 because you need it for Algebra 2, which you might need to go to college which you might need to get a job) to a focus on difference making is the best possible form of preparation for the innovation economy. A portfolio of work that demonstrates expanding contribution to causes that matter — to a young person and their community — is far more valuable to most colleges and employers than a list of courses passed.
What if, instead of a list of required courses, high school was organized around the opportunity to contribute?”
Vander Ark & Liebtag, Difference Making at the Heart of Learning, 2021 (p. 80)
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by Scott McLeod | Jan 12, 2022 | Leadership and Vision, Slides |
You can have a school that emphasizes control and compliance.
Or you can have a school that emphasizes student voice, agency, and risk-taking.
But you can’t have both.
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