Perhaps the reason that so many adults--including, I confess, myself--find it hard to refrain from "helping" kids is that it wounds our egos to see how well they get along without us!  How can that dumb kids of mine learn so much without a smart fellow like me to teach him?  We try in effect to horn in on the kids' sense of pride in accomplishment and, all too often, particularly in schools, we succeed. 

....

At the same time, my father, who thought of himself as trying to "learn Spanish," which meant to learn to speak it correctly, so that then he could talk to the people around him, never learned more than twenty or so words in all the years he lived in Mexico.  Now and then my mother tried to get him to say a few words to the people he met.  He couldn't do it.  He was struck dumb by his school-learned fear of doing it wrong, making a mistake, looking foolish or stupid....

How true is this?  We so quickly learn the motivation of doing it "right or wrong" and this often hinders us in our true pursuit of knowledge.

....

Intelligence is not the measure of how much we know how to do, but of how we behave when we don't know what to do.  It has to do with our ability to think up important questions and then to find ways to get useful answers.  This ability is not a trick that can be taught, nor does it need to be.  We are born with it, and if our other deep animal needs are fairly well satisfied, and we have reasonable access to the world around us, we will put it to work on that world.

This next portion I found particularly interesting and thought provoking.  Mr. Holt is discussing the common issue of writing letters backwards, etc. 

..Most children will compare the two P's, the one they looked at (written by an adult) and the one they made.  Many of them, if they drew their P backwards, may see right away that it is backwards, doesn't look quite the same, is pointing the wrong way--however they may express this in their minds.  Other children may be vaguely aware that the shapes are not pointing the same way, but will see this as a difference that doesn't make any difference, just as for my bank the differences between one of my signatures and another are differences that don't make any difference.  In thinking that this difference doesn't make any difference, the children are being perfectly sensible.  After all, they have been looking at pictures of objects, people, animals, etc., for some time.  They know that a picture of a dog is a picture of a dog, whether the dog is facing right or left.  They also understand, without words, that the image on the page, the picture of dog, cat, bicycle, cup, etc., stands for an object that can be moved, turned around, looked at from different angles.  It is therefore perfectly reasonable for children to think of the picture of a P on the page as standing for a P-shaped object with an existence of its own, an object which could be picked up, turned around, turned upside-down, etc.  Perhaps not all children feel this equally strongly. But for those who do, to be told that a "backwards" P that they have drawn is "wrong", or that it isn't a P at all, must be very confusing and even frightening.  If you can draw a horse, or dog pointing any way you want, why can't you draw a P or B any way you want?  .... What we should do, then, is be careful never to use the words "right" or "wrong" in these reversal situations.  If we ask a child to draw a P, and he draws a T, we could say, "No, that's not a P, that's a T."  But if we ask him to draw a P, and he draws one pointing to the left, we should say, "Yes, that's a P, but when we draw a picture of a P we always draw it pointing this way.  It's not like a dog or cat, that we can draw pointing either way.