Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...days nothing is normal in China -vulgar displays of xenophobia are balanced against the value of having a man on the spot, a diplomatic observer who can help keep track of the anarchy raging inside the Communist giant. Thus the Russians have put up with having the wives and children of their Peking diplomats forced to crawl under portraits of Mao. Italy last week was enduring the truculence of the skipper of a Chinese freighter in Genoa bent on converting the Genovese to Mao. Last week alone, the Chinese accused nations as diverse as Burma, Kenya and Ceylon of participating...
...balding, 44-year-old private-school teacher who shuns educational jargon and rejects the notion that either life or learning can be forced into nifty patterns is quietly emerging as one of U.S. education's most damning critics. In his 1964 book, How Children Fail, Teacher John Holt unreeled a series of classroom anecdotes to show that children-beset by teacher-imposed fear, confusion and boredom-merely grope for right answers, rather than understand. In a sequel, How Children Learn, to be published next month, he illustrates the spontaneous ways in which kids embrace knowledge before they enter schools...
Holt's charge that "most children in school fail" is not the lament of an outside reformer concerned about the obvious failure of the nation's ghetto schools. It is based on Holt's minute note taking and sharp observation in 14 years of teaching above-average students in such selective sanctuaries as Aspen's Colorado Rocky Mountain School, Cambridge's Shady Hill and Boston's Commonwealth. The son of an affluent Manhattan insurance broker, Holt's own education included Switzerland's elite Le Rosey, Phillips Exeter and Yale ('44). Once...
Lost Love. Holt's basic complaint ever since has been that schools test, drill and grade children so often that they lose interest in the meaning of what is being taught, and schooling becomes a charade in which the students' real aim is to escape embarrassment and pain. By contrast, before he gets to school, Holt argues, a child has "a love affair with life." In fact, his attitude toward everything in the world about him is to "taste it, touch it, heft it, bend it, break it-and he is not afraid of making mistakes...
Holt considers much of present schooling a degrading experience for both teachers and students. Children are compelled to work for "petty and contemptible rewards-gold stars, or papers marked 100, or A's on report cards -for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else." They fear a teacher's displeasure, the scorn of their peers, the pain of being wrong. "Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time...