Talk:How Children Fail

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The following reference(s) may be useful when improving this article in the future: Dunn, Jeane (1965-04-15). "Deterrents to Learning". Gloucester County Times. p. 7 – via Newspapers.com. Michalak, Joseph (1964-10-14). "How Children Fail In School". The Daily Times-News. Herald Tribune News Service. p. 23 – via Newspapers.com. B. H. H. (1964-11-01). "Despite 'Success' - School Failure Holt's Subject". The Anniston Star. p. 15 – via Newspapers.com. Fremont-Smith, Eliot (1965-07-28). "'How Children Fail' Both Despairing and Moving". The News Journal. New York Times News Service. p. 23 – via Newspapers.com.

Some assertions are made with nothing to back them up:

• They become unintelligent because they are accustomed by teachers and schools to strive only for teacher approval and for the “right” answers, and to forget all else. In this system, children see no value in thinking and discovery, but see it only in playing the game of school.
• Children believe that they must please the teacher, the adults, at all costs. They learn how to manipulate teachers to gain clues about what the teacher really wants. Through the teacher’s body language, facial expressions and other clues, they learn what might be the right answer.
• When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real.
• As they become “producers”, rather than “thinkers”, they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought.
• They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is “yes”, and that a “no” is defeat.
• They fear wrong answers and shy away from challenges because they may not have the right answer. This fear, which rules them in the school setting, does their thinking and learning a great disservice. A teacher’s job is to help them overcome their fears of failure and explore the problem for real learning. So often, teachers are doing the opposite — building children’s fears up to monumental proportions.

If these claims come from the book, they should have references to it.

There is a strange phrase in one passage straddle the answer - could this be rephrased in a more widely understood way?Autarch (talk) 20:21, 8 September 2010 (UTC)Reply

Some themes are phrased over-forcefully. They do not reflect the milder, often merely implied, tone of Holt's book. On the other hand, other important themes of the book are not covered at all. For example: mistakes made by children in mathematics lessons are often based on the language and terminology used, rather than on numbers and equations. User talk:Der-of-three 11:29 (GMT) 29 October 2023 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Der-of-three (talk • contribs)