Steady-State Economics and Homeschooling

When I started work at John Holt’s company, I was sometimes surprised by the books he chose to sell in his catalog book business. He added books about business, nuclear warfare, and economics that opened my eyes to other ways of viewing social issues and what is possible besides following the well-trod paths of conventional thinking. I was reminded of this when I read the obituary of Herman Daly. We sold Daly’s book Steady-State Economics for several years; though never a popular seller, John insisted on keeping it in the catalog. The NY Times describes Daly’s work this way:

Herman Daly, who for more than 50 years argued that the economic gospel of growth as synonymous with prosperity and progress was fundamentally, and dangerously, flawed because it ignored its associated costs, especially the depletion of natural resources and the pollution it engenders, died on Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. He was 84.

John and Daly had something in common—they were ahead of their time. Though mainstream educators shunned Holt’s work in homeschooling, it was greeted warmly by parents and some alternative educators, much like Daly’s work. The Times writes.

… Although he was branded a heretic for his theories — or, worse, ignored — among traditional economists, he had plenty of adherents, who saw him as prophetic for anticipating climate change’s increasingly harmful impact and the vast sums of money needed to address it. Such propositions might seem simple, but arguing against economic growth, Dr. Daly wrote … was like poking “a big hornets’ nest with a short stick.” “It rudely upsets a very large and comfortable consensus,” he added.

It can be disheartening to realize, again, that many of the ecological and social problems we face today were called out and solutions offered over 40 years ago, but they were ignored in favor of doubling down on existing efforts. From schooling to the environment, Holt sought and promoted solutions that honored human-scale efforts to make things better, in line with the economist E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful ideas, another book John liked and sold.

John wrote in GWS 36:

… this country as a whole is going to have to begin to give some serious thought to some things that already interest many homeschoolers but have so far not been of the slightest interest to schools—economy, efficiency, thrift. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Things like that. No child can be said any more to go into the world and the future even moderately prepared who has not learned, perhaps among many other things, how to live healthily, productively, and happily on very little money, how to do for herself or himself a great many things that most of us now only think of paying others to do.