1923-
School Teacher and Education Critic

Critic of the Status Quo.

John Holt rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the nation's leading theorists on learning. His first two books, How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967), set the tone for a great deal of the school criticism that followed in waves during the 1970s. In these books he laid bare much of what was destructive in the classroom, arguing that teachers and parents had become so habituated to teaching that rarely was there any effort made to comprehend how learning really takes place.

An Idealist and a Teacher.

Holt did not begin to write until he had had many years of experience teaching young children, and his most persistent theme is that the system ignores what it knows, or should know, about how children learn. "We like to say that we send children...