- Paperback
- Publisher: PENGUIN BOOKS LTD (1984)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140225714
- ISBN-13: 978-0140225716
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
- See Complete Table of Contents
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
True to life,
By
This review is from: How Children Fail (Paperback)
I was homeschooled all the way through high school. Although my parents did have an excellent curriculum, they simply didn't bother to make me read literature, great works, or write long essays. Holt asserts that given freedom - as I was - youngsters will naturally explore and educate themselves.This has proven to be absolutely true. In high school, I read Shakespeare, Milton, Boswell - for fun. I also read many works on science, history, and even math. Like many homeschoolers, this has paid off in ways other than education and love of learning - I'm a National Merit Scholar attending college for free. John Holt's idea of unshackling children from the bonds of boring, repetitive lessons works in real life. Furthermore, this book is well-written, adopting a diary-entry approach to let the teacher's discoveries come in the context of a story. I found his definition of intelligence, as an exploring attitude to life (to oversimply a bit), to be inspiring. His book "How Children Learn" is basically more of same. You wouldn't regret reading it, but of the two, this is the essential one.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
How Children Fail,
By Christy Garland (Warner Robins, GA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: How Children Fail (Paperback)
I am a college student at Macon State College majoring in elementary education. I am currently enrolled in EDUC 1000, the Introduction to Elementary Education. At the beginning of this semester we were assigned to choose an educational book. I chose How Children Fail, and I think I really did make a good choice. As I started reading, I was not very interested because of the format of the book, the journal entries. I continued reading and began to enjoy the book more and more. As I reached the summary at the end, I was able to put all of the information I had read together and it seemed to make more and more sense. After all, I really did enjoy reading this book. It enabled me, as a future educator, to see what I can do for my future students so they will not fail. I want to make a difference in the lives of my students, so I feel that by reading this book and other educational books, I will be able to gain knowledge that I will need to know as a future educator.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely essential to any teacher,
By Serdar S. Yegulalp "carbon-based unit" (Huntington, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: How Children Fail (Paperback)
Written in the mid-to-late Fifties, but still incredibly relevant today, "How Children Fail" was originally a series of memos composed by teacher John Holt to his fellow faculty at the primary school where he taught math. Holt was bothered by certain trends he noticed in the classroom -- among both the teachers and the students -- and started analyzing what he saw over the course of several years. Eventually his notes grew to the point where his fellow teachers persuaded him to edit and publish the book, and it has since become a cornerstone of educational theory. Regrettably, its lessons are all too often mouthed rather than taken to heart.Holt's contentions are simple: Children are born learners. This is not even a particularly controversial observation; Piaget was showing that children are inclined to learn more about their world from day one. But there was little or nothing in the current educational system -- designed for the training of factory-workers and desk jockeys, not thinkers and builders -- that supported actual learning. Obviously, Holt has plenty to say about rote learning, which to him is mostly useless when dealing with things like mathematics, where creative approaches are not only needed but urgently desired. One of the best examples of this comes when he gives his class a number of math problems to solve and says, "You've never seen problems like these before, and I don't care how you go about solving them, but try them out." The class eagerly got to work and did some real learning... until Holt was leaned on by the administration to "pick up the pace". This is the second thing that Holt notices: the sometimes subtler ways in which children are kept from learning. One is the pace and size of modern education. The other is the endless farrago of half-baked strategies which are little more than the same old recipes in disguise. Holt takes a moment, for instance, to talk about New Math, and shows that it doesn't matter how good the New Math is when it's just the Bad Old Math in disguise: "cook-bookery," as he puts it; a mindless set of recipes for getting right answers. Holt's contempt for the church of right answers is clear through the book. What is annoying is how his anger has since been misappropriated by people who did not understand that Holt's anger was directed at the emotional fetishism attached to right answers, not the right answers themselves. Holt very obviously wanted children to learn and use their minds -- something which modern outcome-based education, derived at least in part from books like these, does not allow. Holt should really not be blamed for the development of educational fads that would have sickened him. On top of everything else, the book is also a grand work of classroom sociology. The way kids interact with each other and their teachers, the way they do one thing and say another (and why) is dissected and shown up. And Holt also takes the time to show how parents do stupid things like use homework as punishment (a great way to kill a kid's curiosity). The most remarkable thing about the book is how after thirty years it is still relevant, timely, accurate, readable, and indispensible.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
