A presentation on the life and works of the educationist, John Holt, made for a talk by Salman Asif Siddiqui on the topic.

1. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF
JOHN HOLT
A talk by Salman Asif Siddiqui

2. “It’s not that I feel that school is a
good idea gone wrong, but a wrong
idea from the word go. It’s a nutty
notion that we can have a place
where nothing but learning
happens, cut off from the rest of
life.” – John Holt

3. Biographical information
• April 14, 1923: Born in New York City
• 1943 – 1946: Submarine service, US Navy
• 1946 – 1952: Worked in various parts of the World Government
movement
• 1952 – 1953: Travelled in Europe
• 1953 – 1957: Taught at Colorado Rocky Mountain School,
Carbondale CO
• 1957 – 1959: Taught at Shady Hill School, Cambridge MA
• 1959 – 1963: Taught at Lesley Ellis School, Cambridge MA
• 1963 – 1967: Taught at Commonwealth School, Boston MA

4. Biographical information
• 1968: Visiting lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of
Education
• 1969: Visiting lecturer, Dept. of Ed., U.C., Berkeley.
• 1969–1985: Writing, lecturing. Founded Holt Associates, a
Boston office with small staff dealing with education and
other social issues.
• 1977: Began publishing GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING, a
bi-monthly magazine about teaching children at home.
• 1980: Started JOHN HOLT'S BOOK AND MUSIC STORE, a
mail-order service primarily for and about children.
• Died: September 14, 1985, of cancer, at home in Boston,
Mass.

5. “My concern is not to improve
‘education’ but to do away
with it, to end the ugly and
anti-human business of
people-shaping and to allow
and help people to shape
themselves.” – John Holt

6. Books by John Holt
• How Children Fail – 1964
• How Children Learn – 1967
• The Underachieving School – 1969
• What do I do Monday? – 1970
• Freedom and Beyond – 1972
• Escape from Childhood – 1974
• Instead of Education – 1976
• Never Too Late – 1978
• Teach Your Own – 1989
• Learning All the Time – 1981
• A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters – 1991

7. How Children Fail
• This is John Holt’s first
book
• This book was first
published in 1964.
• A revised edition of this
book was published in
1982.

8. “There is no difference between living
and learning… it is impossible and
misleading and harmful to think of
them as being separate.” – John
Holt

9. How Children Learn
• This was first published
in 1967.
• A revised edition was
published in 1983

10. “The most important thing any
teacher has to learn, not to be
learned in any school of education I
ever heard of, can be expressed in
seven words: Learning is not the
product of teaching. Learning is the
product of the activity of learners.”
– John Holt

11. The Underachieving
School
• This book was originally
published in 1969.
• A revised edition was
published in 2005, years
after John Holt’s death

12. What do I do Monday?
• This book was first
published in 1970.
• A revised edition was
published in 1991, after
Holt’s death.

13. “ No use to shout at them to pay
attention. If the situations, the
materials, the problems before the
child do not interest him, his
attention will slip off to what does
interest him, and no amount of
exhortation of threats will bring it
back.” – John Holt

14. Freedom and Beyond
• This book was originally
published in 1972.
• A revised edition of the
book was published in
1991.

15. Escape From Childhood
• First published in 1974.
• In this book, Holt talks
about the needs and
rights of children.
• He claims that children
should have
independence and have
the right to work for
money, to vote and to
receive equal
treatment.

16. Instead of Education

17. Never Too late
• This book was originally
published in 1978, and a
revised edition in 1991.
• The book is John Holt’s
musical life story.
• He learned to play the
cello at the age of forty,
and realized that it is
never too late to learn
something new.

18. “To a very great degree, school
is a place where children
learn to be stupid.” – John
Holt

19. Teach Your Own
• This was first published
in 1981.
• Another edition was
published in 2003,
revised by Pat Farenga.
• The book is a complete
guide to homeschooling
or unschooling, that
was proposed by John
Holt.

20. “What is most important and valuable
about the home as a base for children’s
growth into the world is not that it is a
better school than the schools, but that it
isn’t a school at all. It is not an artificial
place, set up to make ‘learning’ happen
and in which nothing except ‘learning’
ever happens. It is a natural, organic,
central, fundamental human institution,
one might rightly say the foundation of all
other institutions.” – John Holt

21. Learning All the Time

22. “A life worth living, and work worth
doing – that is what I want for
children (and all people), not just, or
not even, something called ‘a better
education’.” – John Holt

23. A Life Worth Living:
Selected Letters
• This book is a collection
of selected letters of
John Holt, that he wrote
to his friends and
colleagues.
• It was published in
1991, six years after his
death.

24. John Holt didn’t have any children of his
own – he never married. Many people
wondered why he didn’t marry and raise
children of his own, as he was so
interested in children. He replied that he
would like to have married; it wasn’t his
doing that he never did.

25. “All I am saying can be summed up in
two words: Trust Children. Nothing
could be more simple, or more
difficult. Difficult because to trust
children, we must first learn to trust
ourselves, and most of us were
taught as children that we could not
be trusted.” – John Holt

26. Sources used
• http://www.johnholtgws.com