Underachieving School

John Holt was a fifth grade teacher who worked in private schools. In 1964, his book "How Children Fail" created an uproar with his observations that forcing children to learn makes them unnaturally self-conscious about learning and stifles children's initiative and creativity by making them focus on how to please the teachers and the schools with the answers they will reward best. His subsequent book, "How Children Learn" (1967), also became widely known. The two are still in print and together they have sold over a million and a half copies and have been translated into over 14 languages.

John Holt displays again with undiminished clarity a kindly intellect that is strong, eloquent and compassionate, holding out to a nation trapped in ignorance a rational way to light the darkness. -- Jonathan Kozol Life This book may stir up almost as much debate as John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Library Journal With our schooling situation growing ever more deplorable, Holt's work is more critically needed than ever. He spells out the problem and its solution with such clarity and simplicity that any parent can read him and every parent should. We ignore his prophetic vision at our peril. -- Joseph Chilton Pearce

• Foreword; True Learning; A Little Learning; Schools Are Bad Places for Kids; The Fourth R: The Rate Race; Teachers Talk Too Much; The Tyranny of Testing; Not So golden Rule Days; Making Children Hate Reading; Order and Disorder; Teaching the Unteachable' Education for the Future; Blackboard Bungle; Children in Prison; Comic Truth on an Urgent Problem.