How Children Fail: angry lessons from failures to teach

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.com reviews John Holt's "How Children Fail," the companion book to "How Children Learn."

Cory blogs:

Earlier this week, I blogged a review of John Holt's classic book on "unschooling," "How Children Learn," promising that my next read would be the companion volume, How Children Fail, a book that's really about how teachers fail students.

"How Children Learn" was, most of all, an exuberant book, a celebration of the a-ha moments that Holt had been privileged to witness first hand and the lessons he'd learned about teaching. Even though it sometimes slipped into anger as Holt decried his own conceit and those of his peers in failing to get out of the way when kids want to learn, Learn is, first and foremost, a happy book.

Not so "How Children Fail" -- in this volume, Holt focuses the majority of his attention on the "I don't get it" moments that his students experience as he attempts to conform them to the curriculum and the lessons he's learned from these bad experiences. This is a much angrier book, though no less humane and caring, and it's equally important, even if there were fewer smiles per page.

Link: BoingBoing.com