HOW CHILDREN LEARN

This enduring classic of educational thought offers teachers and parents deep, original insight into the nature of early learning. John Holt was the first to make clear that, for small children, "learning is as natural as breathing." In this delightful yet profound book, he looks at how we learn to talk, to read, to count, and to reason, and how we can nurture and encourage these natural abilities in our children."

What Hacker News says

gregjorNov 2025

Obligatory post of John Taylor Gatto's article The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher:

https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...

A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.

Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."

We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.

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gregjorJan 2025

I think it refers to this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeschool/comments/1i8utxu/intervi...

All three of my kids (now adults) got schooled at home, then went on to college. More unschooling than homeschooling -- we didn't follow a formal curriculum. Of the group of homeschooling families we socialized with in Portland most of the kids went on to college. Back then we would get college recruiters, including from Ivy League schools, showing up at homeschooling events. I suspect that has a lot to do with the relatively affluent middle class who can afford to homeschool, but it helps that homeschooled kids actually perform well at college.

You can find some videos and accounts of unschoolers with feral kids who can't read. That happens too but not the norm in my experience.

If you haven't already found them, get John Holt's books, especially How Children Learn and How Children Fail. Also Grace Llewellyn and John Taylor Gatto. I liked the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.

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gregjorMay 2024

The article misses the point of learning, confusing it with "education." I wonder how many members of the rationalist community have children.

I haven't read the book reviewed in the article, I no longer have school-age children. For anyone interested in the difference between learning and school/education, and some alternatives such as homeschooling:

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich

How Children Learn and How Children Fail by John Holt

The Six Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

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gregjorOct 2022

> You clearly made choices in how you were raising your children, which means you were satisfying some constraints.

Well, yes, over time. At first we just wanted a child. We didn't have any plan. As a parent you have to make it up as you go -- the experience of other parents only goes so far. Before long I understood that I was dealing with an autonomous person, not someone I could mold or shape. Parents tend to overestimate the control and influence they have, which leads to conflict especially in the teen years and sometimes long into adulthood. I have friends my own age (past 60) who still resent their parents forcing them to play sports or go to violin lessons or sit through math tutoring.

You can find plenty of resources for homeschooling. I think of unschooling as a form of homeschooling. Traditional homeschoolers use a curriculum and try to duplicate at least some of the forms and rituals of traditional school at home. Unschoolers don't follow any curriculum, and involve their kids in the "real world" of adults rather than confining them in school or a simulation of it. The majority of homeschoolers in America do it for religious reasons, though you can find secular homeschooling groups in every city.

Some resources:

How Children Learn and How Children Fail by John Holt.

The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto (online) https://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/SevenLessonsTaughtI...

Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Destruction by John Taylor Gatto.

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.

The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner.

Anything by Maria Montessori.

We kind of fell backwards into it. Our first child went to Montessori school at first, she loved it. Then we moved and couldn't find a Montessori school that had openings (many have long waiting lists), so we enrolled her in public school. After a few weeks she got in trouble for reading a book in class "above her grade level" according to the teacher. She was in second grade reading a Nancy Drew book, bored waiting for the other kids to learn how to read. She cried about going to school after that because the teacher shamed her in class. So we didn't make her go and let her do her own thing. We told the school we planned to move, they never followed up. She went on to (easily) get a high school diploma and went to college. We didn't send our next two kids to school but left the option open, they decided to go later but mainly because of their friends.

We gradually found out about organized homeschooling groups and joined those, which led to lots of opportunities for sharing ideas and letting the kids socialize and play.

It helped that I was able to support all of us so my wife didn't have to work at a job, she did most of the work handling the kids. Unfortunately homeschooling only makes sense for middle- and upper-middle-class families who don't need school to provide day care while they work two jobs. We knew families with stay-at-home dads, and couples who had flexible jobs that allowed them to alternate. I came to believe that kids should have a parent around as much as possible, as a role model and person to answer questions, which is why I objected in the first place to the idea of hiring a nanny or sending kids to school.

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gregjorJan 2022

Compulsory school serves multiple purposes:

- Taxpayer subsidized day care so parents can go to work

- Keeping teens out of the labor pool

- Keeping kids and teens off the street causing trouble

- Social and political indoctrination

- Imparting some minimum level of basic education

Motivated students and their parents can get a lot out of the school system, mainly admission to good universities. Schools used to provide vocational “tracks” for students not focused on university, but that fell away in the ‘70s.

A lot of kids just do the time and get through it, or maybe drop out, possibly learning some useful information and skills, but too often just wasting a lot of time.

You might look into Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, John Holt’s books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, and Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook. John Taylor Gatto, a former Teacher of the Year, wrote this great essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher about school:

https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

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gregjorJun 2021

We learn from birth without conscious effort or awareness. As we get older we learn patterns, incentives, rules, punishments that interfere with self-directed learning. Young children show intense curiosity and learn quickly. After a few years of school those qualities usually get pushed down and replaced by the forms of “education,” which get mistaken for “learning” due to perverse incentives.

You can recover your innate curiosity and ability to learn. If you went through typical schooling you have to give yourself permission to learn on your own. I recommend John Holt’s books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, and Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.

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