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Nicole

Holt: Human Nature 2

Human beings are born intelligent.  We are by nature question-asking, answer-making problem-solving animals, and we are extremely good at it, above all when we are little. But under certain conditions, which may exist anywhere and certainly exist almost all of the time in almost all schools, we stop using our greatest intellectual powers, stop wanting […]

Kohn: No Need for Judgement

If your parent or teacher…is sitting in judgement of what you do, and if that judgement will determine whether good things or bad things happen to you, this cannot help but warp your relationship with that person.  You will not be working collaboratively in order to learn or grow; you will be trying to get […]

Bedtimes

What!? No bed times! Are you nuts!? That’s usually the reaction we get when people find out our unschooled children don’t have a “bedtime”.  Most of us grew up with imposed bedtimes, and adopted the belief that good parents make sure their children get enough sleep by setting and sticking to bedtimes. Dig underneath a […]

Holt: The Right Answer Altar

Practically everything we do in school tends to make children answer-centered. In the first place, right answers pay off. Schools are a kind of temple of worship for “right answers”, and the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar. -John Holt, from How Children Fail

They Sleep WHERE? Family CoSleeping in Middle Class America

Ask people what comes to mind when they imagine a family that sleeps all together in one room, and you basically get three images.  Some envision a family living in a foreign country. Others picture the poverty-stricken – those reduced to sleeping together because of their financial woes. Still others see a  post-hippie, super-alternative type […]

Holt: The Teacher’s Job

It is not the teacher’s proper task to be constantly testing and checking the understanding of the learner. That’s the learner’s task, and only the learner can do it.  The teacher’s job is to answer questions when learners ask them, or to try to help learners understand better when they ask for help. -John Holt, […]