u/ddgr815

>The classical school boom is not nostalgia. It is families returning to foundational questions about what children should know and what habits schools should help cultivate. Schools should teach children to read well, write clearly, reason honestly, know their country’s story, master real knowledge and engage seriously with enduring works of literature, history, philosophy and science.

>The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.

>You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher.

>Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

>Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money.

>Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

>Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

>How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

>The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

>The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

>A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.

>When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

>What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.

>The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen.

>Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we're less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want.

>In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. After all those years you get used to the idea of belonging to a group of people who all get up in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. Belonging to such a group becomes part of your identity: name, age, role, institution. If you have to introduce yourself, or someone else describes you, it will be as something like, John Smith, age 10, a student at such and such elementary school, or John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such college.

>When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it's a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college.

>In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people's. You may not even be aware you're doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won't make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.

>Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don't need to join a company to do that.

>You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work.

>To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

>A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they're out. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

>Except in a few unusual kinds of work, like acting or writing books, you can't be a company of one person. And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with.

>A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.

>If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought that he could have a visible effect on the speed of the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely to notice and complain.

>But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group. But more importantly, by selecting that small a group you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average their work together with a small group of their peers than to average it with everyone.

>What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage.

>Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.

>For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.

>While merit pay has sometimes been framed as a way of getting teachers to work harder, the biggest effect may come from reshaping who enters, remains in, and exits the profession.

>“The key story for me in these findings is that early intervention matters, and if we just wait until third grade to get a signal of where kids are, we’re missing probably the most important window when we can do something about it,” Kuhfeld said.

>But among students in the bottom fifth of their kindergarten class at the start of the school year, just 10% were proficient in math by third grade and just 13.9% were proficient in reading. For students who were still in the bottom 20% at the end of first grade, just 2% — 1 in 50 — were proficient by third grade.

>This project is about what happens after a school district chooses a curriculum, and what it actually takes to make that choice pay off for kids. Across the U.S., a number of districts are figuring that out. Below are case studies about 11 of those districts: what they did, how they did it, and what others can learn from them.

>A recent RAND survey found that the students who are the most likely to maintain interest in math are those who understand and enjoy it, feel supported, and see themselves as “math people.” It also found that nearly a third of high school students have never identified that way.

>When children build robust mathematical ideas and skills early, their later reasoning and fluency grows stronger. If they miss a key idea, the confusion can snowball, leaving gaps that grow as math becomes more complex. In fact, preschool children’s mathematical knowledge predicts their later academic success in both reading and math even more than reading skills do.

>Young children are natural mathematical thinkers. Infants can tell the difference between two objects and three objects well before they know the words “two” and “three.” And by age two, they begin building on their intuitive numerical perceptions through exploring patterns, comparing objects, and counting blocks.

>Research underscores just how important it is for us to understand how young children really learn math. A recent meta-analysis of 39 studies found that guided play—playful exploration thoughtfully supported by an educator—was more effective than direct instruction at developing early math skills, and more effective than free play at building spatial vocabulary. If educators can channel children’s natural mathematical curiosity into playful, guided exploration that leads to mathematical competence in the early years, they set the stage for future success.

>It’s a mistake to pit learning against play. Young children can play and do serious math at the same time. For young children, play often is the way they explore quantity, patterns, and relationships. By teaching math through play, educators tap into children’s natural ability to recognize numerical concepts and build formal language around them.

>Most adults don’t remember what it was like before they knew that “two” is the same as “2,” which is the same as two fingers held up in the air. It can be tempting for grown-ups to move quickly from concrete examples to symbols on a page, but it takes time for young children to make the connections between concrete and abstract representations.

>If students don’t have opportunities to connect mathematical notation to the ideas it represents, they start to see math as pushing symbols around on a piece of paper rather than something they’re already doing in the world.

>Earlier in my career, a graduate student ran an experiment to try to influence her own students’ math success through building math identity. She asked half of her students to write “I am good at math” at the top of each test next to their name. Their test scores were no different than the half who wrote only their name. This simple experiment suggests that mathematical success doesn’t come from self-affirmation alone, but from real mathematical understanding and skill.

>Let’s be blunt. Michigan spends $24.1 billion (state and federal funds) annually on an education system of 1.4 million PK-12 Michigan children, and no one is getting the return on investment needed.

>Real change is the most talked about, but least acted upon, concept when it comes to public education. To say you are in a good school district in Michigan, given our national and global competition, is like saying you are the smartest kid in the remedial class; it is a dubious honor at best.

>The current public education system in Michigan has been static since adopting the Carnegie Unit structure 100 years ago. While this system once served the nation and our state well, it is long overdue for a major overall.

>Multiple education reform plans to improve student academic success in Michigan were made public this spring. Where is the plan from educators? Former governor, Rick Snyder, and former state senator, Doug Ross have a plan, “The 21st Century Learning in Michigan Innovation District legislation.” Launch Michigan has a plan, “Michigan Education Guarantee.” Ed-Trust Midwest has a plan, “Ready for Rigor.” The Business Leaders for Michigan have an education plan in their strategic roadmap, “Michigan in a New Era.”

>We need accountability. Everyone is in charge and no one is accountable. Michigan has 883 different education entities (local districts, charter schools/academies and intermediate school agencies) all of which operate independently from each other. We need to restructure and realign leadership beginning with enhancing the authority of the state superintendent of schools to align the 883 entities in their efforts around improving student outcomes and to hold them accountable.

>If we truly want to improve student academic outcomes, educators need the same high-quality professional learning. We need to grant the state superintendent the authority to require specific training related to state initiatives, such as early literacy teaching and learning, and provide the resources to develop the training and disseminate it for required use in all school districts throughout the state.

>We need to provide literacy coaches in every school who are trained in research-based, effective practices for teaching and assessing reading and can use data to inform instruction and train and coach teachers and school principals.

>For many students, the senior year of high school is a waste of time. They have already met the high school graduation requirements and are no longer interested in their classes. We should restructure the senior year of high school to offer such things as attending a college, trade school, or gaining skills through an apprenticeship, and many other options.

>Look to other states that have implemented reforms to improve student achievement, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Mississippi, Massachusetts and others. Learn from them and request to have those reform efforts funded at the same level.

>The Rise Higher report says fewer than 40% of Detroiters are satisfied with the condition of neighborhood infrastructure such as streets and sidewalks, and there’s ample concern over the cost of housing in the city with more than one-third of residents spending more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage payments, per the report.

>Detroit residents surveyed expressed that the city has no shortage of low-wage work, but a path to long-term, stable careers is more challenging.

>“Small business owners named complex permitting, limited capital, and inconsistent support as the biggest barriers to staying open,” according to the Rise Higher report. “Workers raised concerns about wage theft and uneven enforcement of their rights. And in nearly every neighborhood, residents said that new investment, emerging industries, and innovation feel disconnected from where they live.”

>As districts across the country confront what researchers call a reading recession, Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) has emerged as one of the nation’s most notable examples of academic recovery. The latest Education Recovery Scorecard shows Detroit students learning faster than students in 91 percent of U.S. districts. DPSCD was also named one of six Districts on the Rise, earning recognition for nationally notable gains in reading and math.

>According to the scorecard, DPSCD students are gaining an average of 1.21 grade levels of learning each year, surpassing national averages and outperforming comparable districts in Michigan. Reading recovery ranks in the 88th percentile nationally, with notable progress among Black students. Researchers from Harvard and Stanford selected Detroit for a national case study, pointing to the district’s consistent instructional approach and targeted supports as key drivers of improvement.

>In one fascinating series of studies, researchers found that even young children valued objects they built more highly than identical objects made by someone else.

>This sense of value is not explained simply by ownership. Children still value their creations more, even when they cannot keep them. It’s not explained by effort alone, either—more work doesn’t automatically create more attachment.

>Instead, the researchers proposed something deeper: People become emotionally connected to what they help create because it begins to feel tied to their sense of identity. That finding may explain far more about school culture than we realize.

>Compliance can create short-term order, but commitment creates long-term culture. And commitment grows when people feel psychologically connected to the environment around them.

>The IKEA-effect research suggests that humans naturally value things that have their fingerprints on them. That has enormous implications for schools because the strongest cultures are rarely built for students and staff. They are built with them.

>Involve people in building systems: People become more invested when they help shape the systems around them, and we—teacher Cathleen and principal Nick—have seen this firsthand in our work. In Cathleen’s classroom, students begin the year by answering a simple question: What helps you thrive in a learning environment?

>Students often say things like humor, trust, honesty, encouragement, and respect. Together, the class narrows those ideas into five essential community principles. Then every classroom procedure and expectation is tied back to those shared values.

>If students value trust, the class discusses the routines that build trust. If they value respect, they define what respectful disagreement looks like in practice. The result is powerful: Students are far more likely to protect norms they helped create than rules they were simply handed.

>Schools function differently when people see themselves as contributors instead of passive participants.

>Nick has seen that some of the strongest culture shifts happen when students begin recognizing that every adult in the building contributes to the school community. Even simple practices, like intentionally ensuring that students know custodians and cafeteria and office staff by name, can strengthen empathy and belonging across the building.

>That sense of ownership deepens when students actively contribute to the daily functioning of the school. They can help custodians clean up shared spaces after lunch, serve as hall monitors during transitions, support recycling efforts, assist with school events, or help welcome guests and families into the building.

>These responsibilities do more than lighten adult workloads. They help students see themselves as active contributors to the school community rather than passive participants moving through it. People protect places where they feel needed.

Susannah Sheffer: What’s an example of something a child might say that you would think was interesting philosophically?

Gareth Matthews: Children, from the ages of about 3 or 4 to about 7 or 8, raise almost all of the basic questions of philosophy in some form or other. Adults usually don’t know how to react but find this interesting or intriguing, and often remember the comment, which might be a question about dreaming—I have an example in Philosophy and the Young Child of a child asking, “How do I know whether I’m dreaming now?” It might be a question about God, or about perception—another example I give is of a child going up in an airplane for the first time and being relieved to observe that people don’t shrink as they go up in the air, which is what he had thought. Really, all of the basic questions of philosophy can turn up in the conversation of a young child. In my experience, these comments tend to disappear at about the time children get well socialized in school, so that’s a rather unfortunate commentary on our society and our schools.

SS: How can we respond to comments like these?

GM: What I’ve been trying to convince adults to do is to think about the questions themselves, to get rid of the assumption that most adults have, that they know the answer to any question a child of that age could raise. I encourage adults to engage the child in a discussion of whatever he or she has raised, even if they are not at all clear themselves about how the answer will come out.

SS: Some adults might say, “But I don’t even know the first thing about how to respond to that sort of comment.”

GM: I think adults react this way because they assume a position of superiority to children. They assume that children are incapable of thinking about matters that adults don’t know the answers to. But once adults free themselves of that assumption, I think we’re all capable of thinking about these questions. Maybe the more practice we have, the better we get at it, but we’re all capable of it, and I try in my books to give some examples of how the discussion might go on after the child’s initial comment.

SS: How do you think children react to the adult not knowing the answer?

GM: Well, I think the best thing to do is to begin to explore the issue — could we say this, could we say that — and let the child participate in that process of trying to answer the question. Now, the child may suspect that this kind of reply is phony, that the adult really does have some answer in mind, but that’s because of a certain phoniness in our dealings with children in general. Socratic questioning in schools is by and large rather phony; the teacher just uses it as a way of stringing the child along until the child gets the answer that the adult wants. But if we can develop another kind of relationship with the child, this kind of questioning and trying things out won’t seem phony anymore. The child will be prepared to believe that the adult really is thinking about the issue and isn’t just trying to get a particular answer out of the child.

SS: Perhaps if the child and adult have had other experiences of working together on something, the possibility of working together in a philosophical discussion won’t seem so strange.

I’m interested in your discussion, in your books, of the effect of developmental psychology on our thinking about children’s philosophical abilities.

GM: The idea that there are stages of development, which came chiefly from Jean Piaget, is very powerful, and it’s hard to get out of the grip of it. But the danger is that we ask children questions only to determine whether they’re at stage one or stage two. Missing in that endeavor is any appreciation of what is philosophically problematic about the terms of discussion. Piaget proceeds as though there were nothing really problematic or puzzling about dreaming or thinking or life or any of these things which he questions children about. So if a child is puzzled by the psychologist’s question, the psychologist may be inclined to think that child is simply at an early stage of development, instead of thinking that the question may truly be puzzling, to adults as well.

The trouble with developmental psychology is that it can lead to a view in which one sees children almost as members of another culture, with ways of thinking that are so different from ours that we can’t hope to share their outlook—and it’s not just that their ways of thinking are different, but that they are at an earlier stage of development, one that we have moved beyond. There’s an enormous condescension built into this, because we assume that what we need to do, in responding to children, is not think about things in their terms but instead goad them into moving along the stages of development so that they will learn to think the way we do. In my view, this effect of developmental psychology is very constricting and keeps us from recognizing that very often children are much more sensitive to what is philosophically interesting and philosophically problematic than adults are. So instead of being condescending toward them and encouraging them to develop adult ways of thinking, we should take advantage of their natural puzzlement, their sense for incongruity and misfit in language and thought.

SS: I wonder, then, if there’s a danger in focusing on how children do philosophy, as you have. Couldn’t someone accuse you of condescending to children by focusing on how children do philosophy instead of simply on how everyone does philosophy?

GM: Sure, there is worry there. But it seems to me that there are both differences and similarities in the way that children and adults do philosophy, and the differences have to do with a kind of spontaneity and directness that is often in a child’s comment. I think adults can profit from this—from the way children do philosophy. I sometimes use a child’s comment in a philosophical paper because of the vividness with which the child is able to present something.

SS: In that case, you’re really allowing the child to contribute to adult philosophy.

GM: Yes, and children can contribute in other ways. Once a group of children helped me by not being puzzled by something that is traditionally considered a paradox in philosophy. All these years I’d been teaching this to college students, and of course they just take notes and figure out what they have to learn to take the exam, but these younger kids wouldn’t buy the paradox, and so I realized that I had failed to understand something that I had thought I’d understood.

SS: I’m still interested in the question of the segregation of children. You talk about the question of children’s art in the paper that we published in GWS #56, and it comes up for us when people ask whether we publish children’s writing. In fact, we publish a great deal of children’s writing, but not in a special section called “Children’s Writing.” Some people think that children are served by a special section of a magazine, or art gallery, or whatever, devoted especially to them, and others think that this is condescending or discriminatory.

GM: Of course, that fits in with other issues of discrimination—gender discrimination, racial discrimination—which are hard issues. I think what we have to do to get rid of, or at least minimize, our prejudice against the products of children’s efforts, whether thinking or writing or painting or whatever, is to appreciate some of the wonderful advantages that they have, as children. There are some things we can get from them that we can’t get from adults.

SS: Can you speculate about how children feel about this segregation issue?

GM: I think they probably expect to be segregated, but it’s interesting—I think one reason I was able to work well with the group in Edinburgh, in the music school, was that they were treated as musicians. They were young and inexperienced in various ways, but they also had to be relied on to perform, so they were recognized as musicians. The more that we allow children to be in the position of doing things that are valued for their own sake, and not simply as signs that they’re developing properly, the more we will be able to deal with some of this prejudice.

SS: You stress what children can offer adults in doing philosophy. What about what you can offer them? Do you hide your greater experience and knowledge in some areas, or do you make them aware of it?

GM: It may be harder with some knowledge that’s clearly cumulative, like science, but it’s easier in philosophy, because a good philosopher can always start over. If you’re going to do it well you have to regain the puzzlement that motivates the whole thing. But you don’t have to hide anything from children. An adult philosopher has a better sense of where the question might go, a better sense of the language, a lot more background, so you’re a more informed respondent. But of course that very competence can have a kind of deadening effect, because it may mean that we don’t see what’s puzzling or problematic or interesting. So I think it balances out pretty well—adults and children each have something to give the other. I think the children I’ve worked with recognize that I have philosophical knowledge and experience that they don’t have, but if they’re really gripped by the philosophical question, they also realize that they need to work it out for themselves. So the most I can do is be a sounding board for them or maybe give them a little direction here and there.

SS: You said in the children’s art paper that children’s liberation would mean liberation for adults as well. What did you mean by that?

GM: In the same way that it’s a liberation for men when they don’t have to rely on the false assumptions of superiority that go with sexism, so it is with a new view of children—there’s a new freedom to approach the child as another human being, coming from a somewhat different experience. We no longer have to say, “This is a child at such-and-such an age, at such-and-such a stage of development, so one can expect the following things,” and put all kinds of limitations on the possibilities for interchange with the child.

SS: Do you think it’s ever useful to think in terms of ages, or of how a child might be thinking developmentally?

GM: I think it’s always useful to think about where the child is coming from, what differences there might be between the way the child thinks about something and the way I think about something, but I think this is always true with another human being, especially one from a very different background or different experience. There may be some generalizations you can make about children at various ages, but I think one should be very wary of these generalizations, because we should be constantly surprised by how children vastly exceed the expectations we may have for any particular stage of development.

SS: What issues are you looking at these days?

GM: I’m interested in issues of development, which we’ve just been talking about—how can we think about children, what is a child—and that moves into questions about children’s art, children’s literature (both by and for children). The questions about literature for children are fascinating; some people think that writing for children must be phony, because the author is no longer a child, so if the author says, “I’m writing this for myself,” how can that be? And I’ve moved into discussions of children’s rights and the place of children in society. Often the justifications for limiting children’s rights have to do with these developmental theories—theories about cognitive development or about moral development—and I think this is very problematic.

>>Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them.

>Since this is a book about a simple, but radical idea — that children are learning animals and that adults should stay out of the way of their natural investigations as much as possible — many of the notes suggest that Holt didn’t think he went far enough in the beginning. It’s an exciting text, because it’s an artifact of someone really grappling with ideas, and also having a conversation with themselves. (When’s the last time you read an author arguing with himself?)

>>All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words—Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.”

>I was reminded of Laurence Weschler writing about David Hockney, and how “interest-ing” for Hockney is a verb: it is the continual projection of interest. (The more you look at something, the more interesting it gets.) This was certainly the case with me after I started reading this book, and familiarizing myself with Holt’s work: I, who felt like a somewhat enlightened parent, started noting all the ways I wasn’t paying attention to them, and over time, they have become more interesting to me, not because I’m doting on them more, or even spending more time with them, but because I am looking at them like little scientists, or just little people, who are worthy of interest. (It sounds so stupid: of course a parent should find their kids interesting, but think about how many parents and teachers and adults you know — maybe including yourself — who, secretly, probably don’t.)

>“It is before they get to school that children are likely to do their best learning.”

>>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 and 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.

>>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.

>Children want to be like adults and older children:

>>Children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do—read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want… They [don’t] run around pretending to be Superman. Such fantasies have to be learned from the adults who invent and sell them.

>>[H]ow much children must have learned from watching people do real work, in the days when a child could see people doing real work. It is not so easy to manage this now. So much of the so-called work done in our society is not work at all, certainly not as a child could understand it… It is in every way useful for children to see adults doing real work and, wherever possible, to be able to help them.

>Children don’t want to be told what to learn.

>>Children resist, almost always angrily, all such unasked-for teaching because they hear in it the (perhaps unconscious) message, “You’re not smart enough to see that this is important to learn, and even if you were, you’re not smart enough to learn it.” Naturally it makes them hurt and angry. “Let me do it by myself!” they shout. That’s just what we should do.

>Education is “the game of trying to find out how the world works.”

>>Children seek out meaning, which is to say, whatever helps them make the most sense of the world they live in… We do things backwards. We think in terms of getting a skill first, and then finding useful and interesting things to do with it. The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed.

>If we give them space to learn at their own pace, they go further and farther:

>>They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do. It is natural for them to jump from one thing to another, and to make the kinds of connections that are rarely made in formal classes and textbooks. They make their own paths into the unknown, paths that we would never think of making for them… Finally, when they are following their own noses, learning what they are curious about, children go faster, cover more territory than we would ever think of trying to mark out for them, or make them cover.

>Children don’t need to be tested or quizzed.

>>Our constant checking up on children’s learning so often prevents and destroys learning, and even in time most of the capacity to learn. In How Children Fail, I said that the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.

>>When we constantly ask children questions to find out whether they know something (or prove to ourselves that they don’t), we almost always cut short the slow process by which, testing their hunches against experience, they turn them into secure knowledge. Asking children questions about things they are only just beginning to learn is like sitting in a chair which has only just been glued. The structure collapses.

>If we want to do our best learning, it might be good to emulate children.

>>We must clear [our minds] of preconceived notions, we must suspend judgement, we must open ourselves to the situation, take in as much data as we can, and wait patiently for some kind of order to appear out of the chaos. In short, we must think like a little child…. Remember what you have learned about learning. Be like a child. Use your eyes. Gag that teacher’s mouth inside your head, asking all those questions. Don’t try to analyze this thing, look at it, take it in…. The only thing to do [is] to turn off the questions and watch—like a child. Take it all in. See everything, worry about nothing.

>A punk rock sentence: “It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.”

>>The spirit of [playing] games is everything. The only good reason for playing games with babies is because we love them, and delight in playing these games with them and in sharing their delight in playing—not because we want someday to get them into college. It is our delight in the baby and the games that make the games fun, and worthwhile and useful for the baby. Take away the delight, and put in its place some cold-hearted calculation about future I.Q. and SAT scores, and we kill the game, for ourselves and the baby.

>Parents might want to think of ourselves as librarians, rather than teachers.

>“One of the most important things teachers can do for any learner is to make the learner less and less dependent on them.”

>>Each new thing they learn makes them aware of other new things to be learned. Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food… Keeping their curiosity “well supplied with food” doesn’t mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves. It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food—like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (if we can imagine such a thing).

>In some ways, he approaches children more like an artist: his instructions are to simply love them, and look at them, really look at them, and record what you see. He quotes psychiatrist R.D. Laing as saying, “Love reveals facts which, without it, remain undisclosed.”

>>Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.