John Caldwell Holt

John Caldwell Holt (born April 14, 1923 in New York City , New York , † September 14, 1985 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American author and educator . He has published several books on self-directed learning and children's rights and edited the magazine Growing Without Schooling .

Life

After the Second World War , Holt first worked in New York for the United World Federalists and became managing director of their New York division, but left this organization in 1952.

He then worked as a teacher in Colorado and later in Boston . Together with Bill Hull , he started a project in which they taught each other and observed the class. Holt explored the question of why children in school lose interest in learning over time. He concluded that this is because students are afraid of giving wrong answers and being ridiculed by teachers and classmates for not being good enough. This is made worse by the fact that students are forced to learn things that do not necessarily interest them.

Based on these observations, John Holt published How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967). Together they have been sold more than two million times and translated into 14 languages. An expanded, annotated edition was published for both books in 1982, in which Holt reflected on the previous years and assessed passages differently.

In his book Escape from Childhood on children's rights, published in 1974 , he called for the right of children to determine their own learning, that is, to decide for themselves what, when, where, how, how much, how quickly and with what help they want to learn, as well as the right to decide whether they want to go to school to study, and if so: which one and for how long. He justified this with the fact that the freedom to learn is part of the freedom of thought and this is even more fundamental than the freedom of expression . He also spoke out in Escape from Childhood for the right to vote for children , as well as for the right to conclude contracts.

After years of working in the school system and trying to reform schools, John Holt came to believe that the school system could not be reformed. He thought about how children can learn without conventional schools. So he became a proponent of homeschooling and established what became known as unschooling . In 1977, Holt founded Growing Without Schooling, the first homeschooling magazine in the USA.

bibliography

John Holt's works have appeared several times in Germany under different titles by various publishers.

• How Children Fail , Pitman Publishing, New York, 1964,
  • expanded and annotated edition, Delacorte Press, New York, 1982, ISBN 0-14-013556-1
  • German: Smart children become pupils. On what is forgotten in school , Beltz, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3-407-22132-0
• How Children Learn , Pitman Publishing, New York, 1964
  • German: How children learn , Beltz 1971, ISBN 3-407-28133-1
  • German: How children think , Weinheim and Basel 1979
  • How small children get smart - Independent learning in everyday life, BELTZ-Verlag, Weinheim, 2003, ISBN 3-407-22855-4
  • expanded and annotated edition, Delacorte Press, New York, 1982, ISBN 0-201-48404-8
• The Underachieving School
• What Do I Do Monday?
  • dt .: Why school anyway? , Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg, 1975, ISBN 3-473-60403-8
  • German: Children learn independently or not at all , BELTZ-Verlag, Weinheim, 1999, ISBN 3-407-22009-X
• Freedom and Beyond
  • German: Freedom is more: from the limits of school education, Maier, Ravensburg, 1974, ISBN 3-473-41024-1
• Escape From Childhood
  • German: To the devil with childhood , Verlag Büchse der Pandora, Wetzlar, 1978, ISBN 3-88178-014-9
• Instead of education
• Never Too Late
• Teach your own
  • German: Education in Freedom , Genius Verlag, Bremen, 2009, ISBN 978-3-934719-29-3
• Learning All the Time , Holt Associates, 1989, ISBN 0-201-55091-1
• A Life Worth Living: The Selected Letters of John Holt , Susannah Sheffer (ed.)

Web links

• Literature by and about John Caldwell Holt in the catalog of the German National Library
• John Holt and Growing Without Schooling