Jennifer Rosse Hamm

“We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions — if they have any — and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”

― John Holt

Hello and thanks for visiting.

This website is a record of my studies and thoughts regarding how we treat children, how they best learn and why we need to change how we approach childcare and education. It is a compilation of my thoughts and a resource of texts and people that have inspired me in the work they are doing regarding caring for our children.

From the moment they are born, children are incredibly competent, curious, intelligent explorers. I believe that children deserve to be treated with respect. The best lesson that we can give our children is this:

“You are competent. You have eyes and a brain and can figure things out. You know your abilities and limitations. Through your self-directed play and exploration you will learn what you need to know. Your needs are valued. Your opinions count. You are responsible for your own mistakes and can be trusted to learn from them. Social life is not the pitting of will against will, but the helping of one another so all can have what they need and most desire. We are with you, not against you.”―Peter Gray

“…schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it’s appropriate ‘morsel’ and ‘shock.’ And when this method doesn’t work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children — something they must try to diagnose and treat.”

— John Holt

“What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?”

— John Dewey

“Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”

— John Holt

“It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”

— Albert Einstein

“We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”

— John Holt

“The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.”

— John Holt

“…all pedagogy is superfluous as long as children are provided with a dependable person in early childhood, can use this person, and need not fear losing him or her or being abandoned if they express their feelings. Children who are taken seriously, respected, and supported in this way can experience themselves and the world on their own terms and do not need adult coercion.”

— ALICE MILLER, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD: HIDDEN CRUELTY IN CHILD-REARING AND THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE

“Adults in our culture often assume that it is their job to keep children more or less constantly busy. But the crucial lesson that children must learn is how to take control of their own life, and for that to happen we must back off. Our greatest gift to children, concerning their education, is free time to discover and pursue their own interests.”

―THE ALLIANCE FOR SELF-DIRECTED EDUCATION

“Narcissistic parents are not tuned into their children, and the narcissistic parent largely views the child as an object with which to satisfy his or her needs. Narcissistic parents will be overly indulgent and intrusive about some things and detached and uninterested in others. Children in these situations often believe life is unpredictable and strive hard to please “unpleasable” and distracted parents. If you grow up like this, you learn that you are valued for what you did, but only if it was aligned with your parent’s wants and needs. It can be a confusing way to grow up and also the perfect set-up for accepting narcissistic behavior as “normal” and then tolerating it from a partner or in other close relationships.”

―Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I go?

“It is time to relinquish destructive models and to mistrust the principle of obedience. We have no need of obedient children brainwashed by their upbringing to be the ideal victims for the empty verbiage and the blandishments of terrorists and lunatic ideologists and ready to fall in with their commands, even to the extent of killing others. We need children with open eyes and ears, children prepared to protest against injustice, stupidity and ignorance with arguments and constructive action.”

―Alice Miller, MARY AND JOSEPH – PARENTS TO EMULATE

“Parents want power and obedient children because they feel too weak to be true to themselves and their own feelings, too weak to admit those feelings to their children. But it is precisely this kind of honesty with our children that makes us strong. To tell the truth we do not need to have power over others.”

―Alice Miller, MARY AND JOSEPH – PARENTS TO EMULATE

“When we become aware of how the school system is a conditioning agent to instill in children obedience to authority, passivity, and tolerance to tedium for the sake of external rewards, we begin to question school performance as a metric of well-being. Maybe a healthy child is one who resists schooling and standardization, not one who excels at it.”

―Charles Eisenstein, THE MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD OUR HEARTS KNOW IS POSSIBLE