'As a result of my experience as a teacher of teenagers and ten-year-olds, and as a friend of the many children of my sisters and of many of my other friends, I had come to feel and to hope that from very young children I might learn some interesting and important things about children's learning. In the spring of that same year, in the school where I taught fifth grade, I had spent as much time as I could, in the early morning before school officially began, with the nursery school group of three-yearolds. But Lisa was even younger, only one and a half, and I had never before had a chance to spend so much time with a child so young. So I was enormously interested in everything she did, and every day more astonished and delighted by her skill, patience, industry, intelligence, and seriousness. If I looked at her closely, it was not with the eye and feelings of someone looking at a specimen through a microscope, but more in the spirit in which I looked every day that summer at the snow-covered Colorado mountains across the valley--a mixture of interest, pleasure, excitement, awe, and wonder. I was watching, and in some small way taking part in, a miracle.'
John Holt
