How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading John Holt

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.

Mr. Holt decided to let his students read whatever they would like, if they didn’t like it then they can put it back and find another. He became good friends with a student and learned that she loved horses; he suggested that she should read something similar to horses, she liked it very much. When students read books, they usually skip the hard parts and go to the next good part of the story. Reading should be exciting and adventurous.