One of my first tasks when I volunteered at Holt Associates/Growing Without Schooling was to unpack the hardcover copies of John Holt’s newest book, Teach Your Own, and put them on the office shelves. This Fall marks Teach Your Own’s 40th anniversary in print and my 40th anniversary working in the homeschooling/alternative education movement. I had no idea in 1981 that I’d devote myself to this work, particularly since I didn’t even finish Teach Your Own when I first read it.
When I told Peggy Durkee, John’s office manager, that I couldn’t get my head around Teach Your Own—parents teaching their own children? Letting children figure things out on their own?—she suggested I read his first book, How Children Fail, to see where he was coming from. Grounded in the classroom and expressing how students feel and act when being instructed, How Children Fail gave me common ground to see where John was coming from. I identified with his descriptions of students blustering their way through confusing lectures, misunderstood instructions, and unfair tests, and it gave me a foothold into John’s thought and my own experiences of school. I read a few more of his books before I can say read and understood Teach Your Own, and when I did it’s message about how adults can trust children to learn instead of policing them to learn made sense.
But John went well beyond trying to make schools more humane institutions for children–he encouraged more institutions and public areas for children to access instead of just the school silo. He eventually stopped advising parents to form small, alternative schools and urged them to unschool—to create clubs around shared interests and other social experiences instead of getting bogged down with the administration and politics of funding and operating a school. When John died in 1985 he didn’t think homeschooling would grow to more than 2% of the school-age population; in this pandemic time, the conservative estimate is that about 6% of students will be homeschooled in 2021. The delta variant may cause an increase in homeschooling well beyond 6%, but regardless of how much growth occurs, there is no doubt homeschooling has crossed into a new level of acceptance for families since the pandemic.
With my colleagues at Holt Associates, particularly Donna Richoux, Susannah Sheffer, and Meredith Collins, the subsequent editors of Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine after John died, I helped nurture and grow homeschooling over the years. My work as ad manager and then publisher of GWS led me to speak at education conferences and to the media about homeschooling and unschooling and to meet an incredible array of families who choose to nurture learning over schooling. I treasure the friendships I’ve made through my work and homeschooling our children, and I look forward to seeing self-directed education continue to grow, generation after generation.
Please note the new edition's revised title: Teach Your Own: The Indispensable Guide to Living and Learning with Children at Home. It will be available in stores on September 28. You can preorder a copy at Amazon.
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