[N]ot just our actions and reactions but our very perceptions, what we think we see, feel, smell, and so on, are deeply affected by our mental model, our assumptions and beliefs about the way things really are. In a great variety of experiments with perception, many people, many times over, have shown this to be true. Therefore it is not just fancy and tricky talk to say that each of us lives, not so much in an objective out-there world that is the same for all of us, but in his mental model of that world. It is this model of the world that he experiences. We are not, then starting an impossible contradiction, or using language carelessly, when we say that I live in my mental model of the world, and my mental model lives in me.
I haven’t read it, but I have read quite a bit of other
things by John Holt.
He is known mainly as a theorist of education (the title of
the above-quoted book may be a reference to a teacher trying
to plan class activities) but he would probably say that he
was interested in learning, and interested in education
only inasmuch as it helps or hinders learning. He is the
primary initiator of the
“unschooling”
philosophy of homeschooling.
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
Compare “Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom”
Speak to us more of this book.
I haven’t read it, but I have read quite a bit of other things by John Holt.
He is known mainly as a theorist of education (the title of the above-quoted book may be a reference to a teacher trying to plan class activities) but he would probably say that he was interested in learning, and interested in education only inasmuch as it helps or hinders learning. He is the primary initiator of the “unschooling” philosophy of homeschooling.
I have posted some other John Holt quotes elsewhere in this post’s thread.
Related to that:
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
-- Anais Nin