How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading John Holt

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In the essay titled “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading” written by John Holt and published in Reading for writers in 2013, Mr. Holt discusses why most children aren’t interested in reading. Mr. Holt spent fourteen years as an elementary school teacher. He believed classroom activities destroy a student’s learning ability. Mr. Holt never let his students say what they thought about a book. He wanted his students to look up every word they didn’t know. People can learn difficult words without looking them up in the dictionary. The author read books which his peers thought were “too hard” for him but that was how he became a strong reader. He realized teachers made books a public humiliation for children who had to read aloud.

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