How Teachers Make Students Hate Reading John Holt

After various years of teaching, John Holt comes to the conclusion that schools are a place filled with danger and silence. Throughout his essay, How Teachers Make Students Hate Reading, educator and writer John Holt uses several examples from his prior teaching experiences and also gives his readers insight based on what experiments he puts the students at trial with to exemplify the meaning for his claim. In the personal narrative essay Aria, written by Richard Rodriguez, I was able to find similarities that provide insight about the pressures children are bound to feel in school according to Holt. Because of Holt’s ideas which explained his claim about school being a dangerous place, it also allowed his readers to understand as to why Rodriguez

Holt had a very narrow teaching approach. “I never gave my students an opportunity to say what they actually thought about a book.” “I gave vocabulary drills and quizzes too.”(196) These are just a few examples of his teaching tactics in which he displayed and thought to be the most constructive. Holt’s sister seemed to have been the only person with the audacity to question his traditional English teaching style. While being questioned about the method he used, searching for each word’s definition in the dictionary; Holt slowly began to recognize the adversity in the environment children may face at school.
Having taught the fifth-grade for about four years, Holt seemed to feel very confident in his theories of learning; not at all acknowledging his students’ feelings. In time, Holt began to gradually give his students new methodologies which soon gave him tremendously different outcomes. “This is exactly what reading should be and in school so seldom is-an exciting, joyous adventure” (199), Holt was now beginning to realize the more deep meaning to having to take an English

Therefore he felt that if he were to really learn the public language that he would lose connection with his roots which would then result in him growing apart from his family heritage. Richard quoted “today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of individuality by becoming assimilated into public society”, having said this RIchard shows his readers the contradiction that may or may not arise when a child is put in a primarily English speaking school. Eventually learning the public language, Richard’s fear of losing his heritage became a reality. His homelife was not the same anymore, not many intimate family voices to be heard. “...the day I raised my hand in class and spoke loudly to an entire roomful of faces, my childhood started to