Let me sum up what I have been trying to say about the natural learning style of young children. The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, do what he can see other people doing. He is open, receptive, and perceptive. He does not shut himself off from the strange, confused, complicated world around him. He observes it closely and sharply, tries to take it all in. He is experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense. He does not have to have instant meaning in any new situation. He is willing and able to wait for meaning to come to him–even if it comes very slowly, which it usually does.

To this I would add something even more important. Children even as young as two want not just to learn about but to be a part of our adult world. They want to become skillful, careful, able to do things and make things as we do. They want to talk as we do, that is, communicate ideas and feelings, and in that sense they do talk–even before they know any “real” words, which they learn not so that when they have enough of them they can begin to talk, but so that they can talk even better right now. In the same way, when a little older, they often want to write to other people even before they know how to make letter shapes or spell words, and they learn real shapes and spellings not so that later they may begin to write but so that other people may right now be able to read their writing.

It is a serious mistake to say that, in order to learn, children must first be able to “delay gratification,” i.e., must be willing to learn useless and meaningless things on the faint chance that later they may be able to make use of some of them. It is their desire and determination to do real things, not in the future but right now, that gives children the curiosity, energy, determination, and patience to learn all they learn.

Children also do much of their learning in great bursts of passion and enthusiasm. Except for those physical skills which can’t be learned any other way, children rarely learn on the slow, steady schedules that schools make for them. They are more likely to be insatiably curious for a while about some particular interest, and to read, write, talk, and ask questions about it for hours a day and for days on end. Then suddenly they may drop that interest and turn to something completely different, or even for a while seem to have no interests at all. This usually means that for the time being they have all the information on that subject that they can digest, and need to explore the world in a different way, or perhaps simply get a firmer grip on what they already know.

In talking, reading, writing, and many other things they do, children are perfectly able, if not hurried or made ashamed or fearful, to notice and correct most of their own mistakes. At first they tend to see these mistakes not as things done wrongly or badly but only as things done differently. Like my six-year-old friend who right now writes her letters forwards but her numerals backwards, they may think that these differences don’t make any difference–if you know that the sign 3 stands for “three,” what difference does it make which way it faces? But just as she has already taught herself to write her letters our way, she will soon decide that she wants to make her numbers our way as well–and then, without fuss or uproar, she will do it.

Children’s need to make sense of the world and to be skillful in it is as deep and strong as their need for food or rest or sleep. At times it may be even stronger. Millicent Shinn wrote that her niece Ruth, even when a tiny baby and “fretting with hunger,” would often stop eating and ask to be held up so that she could see something that interested her. And we know how hard it is to get infants, even babies, no matter how tired, to go to sleep if they sense that there is anything interesting going on around them.

School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning. Can we make it so? I think we can, and must. In this book I have tried to suggest, very briefly, how we might do it. To discuss this in any detail would take a book in itself.

In the next few years a number of such books were written, including George Dennison The Lives of Children, James Herndon The Way It Spozed to Be and How to Survive in Your Native Land, Herbert Kohl’s Thirty-six Children, Reading How To, and others, Daniel Fader Hooked on Books and The Naked Children, Joseph Featherstone Schools Where Children Learn (mostly about British schools), Charles Silberman Crisis in the Classroom, and several by myself. Such changes in schools as they may have helped to bring about did not spread very far or last very long. With respect to what I have said in this book about the learning of children, the schools are with few exceptions worse than they were when I wrote it.

What is essential is to realize that children learn independently, not in bunches; that they learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please or appease the adults in power; and that they ought to be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. To such ideas, people react in many ways, but two reactions appear so regularly that they seem worth discussing.

The first is often expressed like this: “Aren’t you asking children to discover and re-create, all by themselves, the whole history of the human race?” It would be easy to dismiss the question as silly, except that so many sensible and serious people ask it. What trips them up is this word “discover.” They act as if it meant “invent,” that is, discover for the first time. But this is not what I mean, or any educators mean, when they talk about the importance of letting children discover things for themselves. We do not ask or expect a child to invent the wheel starting from scratch. He doesn’t have to. The wheel has been invented. It is out there, in front of him. All I am saying is that a child does not need to be told what wheels are and what they are for, in order to know. He can figure it out for himself, in his own way, in his own good time. In the same way, he does not have to invent the electric light bulb, the airplane, the internal combustion engine–or law, government, art, or music. They, too, have been invented, and are out there. The whole culture is out there. What I urge is that a child be free to explore and make sense of that culture in his own way. This is as much discovery as I ask of him, a discovery that he is well able to make.

The second reaction is often expressed like this: “Aren’t there certain things that everyone ought to know, and isn’t it our job, therefore, to make sure that children know them?” This argument can be attacked on many fronts. With the possible exception of knowing how to read, which in any case is a skill, it cannot be proved that any piece of knowledge is essential for everyone. Useful and convenient, perhaps; essential, no. Moreover, the people who feel that certain knowledge is essential do not agree among themselves on what that knowledge is. The historians would vote for history; the linguists, for language; the mathematicians, for math; and so on. In the words of Jimmy Durante, “Everybody wants to get into the act.” Moreover, the knowledge changes, becomes useless, out of date, or downright false. Believers in essential knowledge decreed that when I was in school I should study physics and chemistry. In physics we used a reputable and then up-to-date college text that announced on page 1 that “matter was not created nor destroyed.” Of my chemistry, I remember only two or three formulas and a concept called “valence.” I mentioned valence to a chemist the other day and he laughed. When I asked what was so funny, he said, “Nobody ever talks about valence anymore; it’s an outmoded concept.” And the rate of discovery being what it is, the likelihood that what children learn today will be out of date in twenty years is much greater than it was when I was a student.

My real reason, however, for believing that the learner, young or old, is the best judge of what he should learn next, is very different. I would be against trying to cram knowledge into the heads of children even if we could agree on what knowledge to cram and could be sure that it would not go out of date, even if we could be sure that, once crammed in, it would stay in. Even then, I would trust the child to direct his own learning. For it seems to me a fact that, in our struggle to make sense out of life, the things we most need to learn are the things we most want to learn. To put this another way, curiosity is hardly ever idle. What we want to know, we want to know for a reason. The reason is that there is a hole, a gap, an empty space in our understanding of things, our mental model of the world. We feel that gap like a hole in a tooth and want to fill it up. It makes us ask How? When? Why? While the gap is there, we are in tension, in suspense. Listen to the anxiety in a person’s voice when he says, “This doesn’t make sense!” When the gap in our understanding is filled, we feel pleasure, satisfaction, relief. Things make sense again–or at any rate, they make more sense than they did.

When we learn this way, for these reasons, we learn both rapidly and permanently. The person who really needs to know something does not need to be told many times, drilled, tested. Once is enough. The new piece of knowledge fits into the gap ready for it, like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Once in place, it is held in, it can’t fall out. We don’t forget the things that make the world a more reasonable or interesting place for us, that make our mental model more complete and accurate. Now, if it were possible for us to look into the minds of children and see what gaps in their mental models most needed filling, a good case could be made for giving them the information needed to fill them. But this is not possible. We cannot find out what children’s mental models are like, where they are distorted, where incomplete. We cannot make direct contact with a child’s understanding of the world. Why not? First, because to a very considerable extent he is unaware of much of his own understanding. Secondly, because he hasn’t the skill to put his understanding into words, least of all words that he could be sure would mean to us what they meant to him. Thirdly, because we haven’t time. Words are not only a clumsy and ambiguous means of communication, they are extraordinarily slow. To describe only a very small part of his understanding of the world, a man will write a book that takes us days to read.

I think of some good friends of mine. We know each other well, know each other’s interests, speak each other’s language. We may spend an entire evening talking, each of us intent on gaining a better understanding of the other’s thought. At the end of the evening, with luck, we may each have a very slightly better idea about what the others think on a very particular subject. On the other hand, very often an evening of talk, however pleasant and interesting, may only lead us to realize how little we understand each other, how great are the gulfs and mysteries between us.

The human mind is a mystery. To a very large extent it will probably always be so. We will never get very far in education until we realize this and give up the delusion that we can know, measure, and control what goes on in children’s minds. To know one’s own mind is difficult enough. I am, to quite a high degree, an introspective person. For a long time I have been interested in my own thoughts, feelings, and motives, eager to know as much as I can of the truth about myself. After many years, I think that at most I may know something about a very small part of what goes on in my own head. How preposterous to imagine that I can know what goes on in someone else’s.

In my mind’s ear I can hear the anxious voices of a hundred teachers asking me, “How can you tell, how can you be sure what the children are learning, or even that they are learning anything?” The answer is simple. We can’t tell. We can’t be sure. What I am trying to say about education rests on a belief that, though there is much evidence to support it, I cannot prove, and that may never be proved. Call it a faith. This faith is that man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.

John Holt – How Children Learn, Penguin Books, Revised Edition, p. 286-293