"No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back"
About this Quote
The line lands like a quiet rebuke to every adult reflex that treats attention as obedience. Holt isn’t offering a gentle classroom tip; he’s rejecting an entire moral framework in which a child’s wandering mind is a character flaw to be corrected with volume, shame, or fear. “No use to shout” is the giveaway: the issue isn’t the child’s willpower, it’s the adult’s desperation to control the room.
Holt’s intent is practical and insurgent at once. Practically, he’s pointing to an observable fact: attention is not a faucet you can turn on by command. It’s a relationship between a mind and a situation. The subtext is sharper: when schools rely on “exhortation or threats,” they reveal that the materials and problems have failed to earn attention on their own merits. Coercion becomes the substitute for meaning. “Slip off” matters here; it suggests attention as something that naturally glides toward relevance, curiosity, or urgency, not as a duty that can be demanded.
The context is Holt’s broader critique of conventional schooling in the mid-century U.S., where compliance often masqueraded as learning and standardized pacing treated boredom as a student defect rather than a design failure. He’s also making a political claim about childhood: children are not empty containers to be managed, but agents with internal compasses. If you want their focus, he implies, redesign the situation. Don’t escalate the noise.
Holt’s intent is practical and insurgent at once. Practically, he’s pointing to an observable fact: attention is not a faucet you can turn on by command. It’s a relationship between a mind and a situation. The subtext is sharper: when schools rely on “exhortation or threats,” they reveal that the materials and problems have failed to earn attention on their own merits. Coercion becomes the substitute for meaning. “Slip off” matters here; it suggests attention as something that naturally glides toward relevance, curiosity, or urgency, not as a duty that can be demanded.
The context is Holt’s broader critique of conventional schooling in the mid-century U.S., where compliance often masqueraded as learning and standardized pacing treated boredom as a student defect rather than a design failure. He’s also making a political claim about childhood: children are not empty containers to be managed, but agents with internal compasses. If you want their focus, he implies, redesign the situation. Don’t escalate the noise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
|---|---|
| Source | How Children Fail (1964) by John Holt — passage on children's attention and interest in his discussion of learning and schooling. |
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