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John Holt
b. 4-14-1923; NYC
d. 9-14-1985
John Holt, a proponent of homeschooling, believed that children in school were failing because of fear of getting the wrong answer. His philosopy was “... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.” - from a 1980 Conversation with John Holt.
John Holt quotes ~
• “What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.”
• “Living is learning and when kids are living fully and energetically and happily they are learning a lot, even if we don't always know what it is.”
• “If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him.”
• “We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skillful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated. Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it.”
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bell hooks
née Gloria Jean Watkins
b. 9-25-1952; Hopkinsville, KY
bell hooks, the pen name of Gloria Jan Watkins, is a feminist and social activist whose writng focuses on the interconnectivity of race, class and gender. She is a professor of English and has published numerous books of poetry and nonfiction.
bell hooks quotes ~
• “I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.”
• “Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”
• “Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.”
• “Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.”
• “I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.”
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Myles Horton
b. 7-2-1905; Savannah, Tennessee
d. 1-19-1990
Called the “Father of the Civil Rights Movement”, educator and socialist Myles Horton was the cofounder, with Don West and James A. Dombrowski, of the Highlander Folk School. Among his students were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.
The school was created in 1932 “to provide an educational center in the South for the training of rural and industrial leaders, and for the conservation and enrichment of the indigenous cultural values of the mountains.”
The school was based on the non-academic folk high schools of Denmark for adult education on the belief that schools should educate for life, commonly called lifelong learning.
Myles Horton quotes ~
• “If people have a position on something and you try to argue them into changing it, you're going to strengthen that position. If you want to change people's ideas, you shouldn't try to convince them intellectually. What you need to do is get them into a situation where they'll have to act on ideas, not argue about them.”
• “The only accurate charge I ever had made against me was the time I got arrested [at a mine strike] in 1934. They said I was ‘getting information and going back and teaching it.’ That's exactly what I was doing.”
• “Only people with hope will struggle. The people who are hopeless are grist for the fascist mill. Because they have no hope, they have nothing to build on. If people are in trouble, if people are suffering and exploited and want to get out from under the heel of oppression, if they have hope that it can be done, if they can see a path that leads to a solution, a path that makes sense to them and is consistent with their beliefs and their experience, then they'll move. But it must be a path that they've started clearing. They've got to know the direction in which they are going and have a general idea of the kind of society they'd like to have. If they don't have hope, they don't even look for a path. They look for somebody else to do it for them.”
• peace education posters
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