John Holt Unschooling Quotes & Sayings

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. — John Holt

Young children are such nasty little beasts! — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders. — John Holt

There's a certain kind of woman who will notice someone's terror and call it bravery. — Catherine Lacey

Human kind cannot bear much reality. — T. S. Eliot

Trust your instinct in areas you have some background because your instinct is informed and not blind. - L. R. W. Lee — L.R.W. Lee

Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are. — John Holt

The problem is that I don't want to add another record to the world that is not necessary to be published, except to make some business. There has to be a musical reason. — Eberhard Weber

I believe in the power of love, and planting positive thought seeds into the collective consciousness. — Jay Woodman

This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."
It is the creed of a slave. — John Holt

Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country. — Tony Randall

What you do is less important than the difference you make. — Tiffany Dufu

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. — Alfred North Whitehead

I'll always be in some type of turmoil. So what I've tried to do is just surrender to that. — Lykke Li

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher. — John Holt