How Children Learn

How Children Learn

Author : John C Holt

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Much like, John Holt's previous book (how children fail), this book is very interesting for anyone interested in education or helping children grow and learn. While the message of the book is fairly simple and coherent, there is a lot of value in reading through the stories that he uses to illustrate the point, rather than just this summary.
The core message of the book is that children are inherently gifted at and interested in learning. Rather than attempting to teach, discipline and structure everything for children, we should aim to give them access to our world and learnings. The book itself is focused on very young children, not school going children.
The basic process of learning that John Holt believes children will follow is along the lines of:

• Get interested - Children want to live in the world of adults and be competent at what the adults around them do. To the extent that many early games of make believe & fantasy are more about participating in the real world than escaping from it. As such, children are prone to get interested in what adults do, and want to do it themselves.
• Attempt to mimic - From this interest, children will attempt to mimic what they believe adults are doing. This attempt is often initially short of perfect. That is why children may often play games of make believe, where they believe they are really participating in the adult world just like adults.
• Play - Rather than correcting and teaching children, it is best to let them play and explore, whatever that might mean in a given space. They already intend to mimic adults, and will correct themselves when they discover gaps on their own. Allowing children to play, before teaching makes the task and the space one of their own interest, rather than ours. Further, allowing them to play, enables them to build their own mental model and understand the world, rather than us trying to communicate our own mental model to them in abstract terms.
• Find gaps & patterns - Children will sooner or later discover gaps in their own understanding and process, even if we aren't pointing them out. They are more likely to be interested in understanding the gap and following it, if they find them on their own.
• Repeat - Once gaps are spotted, children may follow the pattern deeper or wider. It is rarely useful to direct them and nudge them towards one pattern in favour of another. What is useful at each step is to provide them with information, answer their questions, and give them as much of the world to explore and learn from as possible.