Books: "How Children Fail", John Holt

Title: How Children Fail

Author: John Holt

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0140135561 (buy on Amazon)

I haven't finished this yet, but so far it's eye-opening. Like What Mothers Do, it articulates stuff I already felt to be true, and it does it clearly. A lot of my difficulties as an adult are easy to see in terms of methods of learning and being taught and surviving school, and I am - again - massively, immensely, technicolouredly grateful to my mother for managing to encourage independent, questioning thought anyway, in spite of, well, everything she had going against her.

This book is going to be a useful reread even before Linnea is school-age, because I'm going to need to be reminded of it for myself as well as for dealing with her and with other people's opinions of how we're raising her.

(She seems socially fairly well adapted, so far, though she does have a faulty ranking system - breastmilk is better than bananas, and better than banana muffins, but not as good as Maya Gold chocolate, damn her.)

Books: "Teach your own", John Holt

Title: Teach your own

Author: John Holt

Publisher: Lighthouse Books

ISBN: 0907637000 (buy on Amazon)

Interesting nodding-head-in-agreement read, but practical-advice-based and very focussed on America before I was born, so not a whole heap of use really. But it's nice to read books that have me nodding agreement all the way through. Except possibly for the "leaving your school-age child home alone all day regularly" which sits all wrong with me - but then, that was an emergency measure, so not a regular recommendation.

Not, I would say, an essential re-read.