How Children Learn
By John Holt

I read this book and its companion, How Children Fail, when I was in my early 20's. I was elected to the school board when I was 18, and I had been doing a lot of thinking about how we educate people. Both books present incredible insight in terms of how to treat children and how to educate them. I went to hear Holt speak once. He was a fairly elderly man at that point. He came out on the stage with a cello, which he played. He said he took up the cello when he was 40 because he wanted to examine why it is that as we get older we don't want to learn new things. He had decided that he wasn't going to let that happen, and that education was going to be a lifelong experience, not something confined to 12 or 16 years in a classroom. I loved that. I think his books are great for teachers to read.