One of the pioneers in the field of education and social reflection, John Holt, early on perceives the reasons why our schools are, for most children, not a place where they can, in an atmosphere of trust, satisfy their natural thirst for learning, but, conversely, a space that hinders their spontaneous desire for creative expression and simultaneously serves as a source of inhibitions, guilt, and unhappiness.

For more than thirty years, John Holt has continuously researched the issues of education from the frontline position of a teacher, seeking the causes of its shortcomings and proposing solutions. When his book 'Why Children Fail' is first published in the 1960s, it sparks a new era of educational reforms while simultaneously serving as a unique study of the learning processes.

In this book, as in his others, the author tackles issues such as the sterility of most conventional teaching methods, the inappropriateness of almost the entire curriculum being taught, the fear of the child that accompanies almost every school activity, and a plethora of other topics, using examples drawn from his personal teaching practice. He has been described as 'the ideologue who, with his vision of what needs to be done in the field of education, made us see with new eyes what is happening inside the school.'