Teach Your Own: The Indispensable Guide to Living and Learning with Children at Home

(Delacorte, 1981, by John Holt. Revised and updated by Patrick Farenga, Perseus 2003, Hachette, 2021)

By John Holt, 1981

...I have used the words "homeschooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make "learning" happen and in which nothing except "learning" ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental human institution, one might easily and rightly say the foundation of all other institutions. We can imagine and indeed we have had human societies without schools, without factories, without libraries, museums, hospitals, roads, legislatures, courts, or any of the institutions which seem so indispensable and permanent a part of modern life. We might someday even choose, or be obliged, to live once again without some or all of these. But we cannot even imagine a society without homes, even if these should be no more than tents, or mud huts, or holes in the ground. What I am trying to say, in short, is that our chief educational problem is not to find a way to make homes more like schools. If anything, it is to make schools less like schools.

By Patrick Farenga, 2021

As a veteran homeschooler and author, I field many questions about the lost educational and social opportunities homeschoolers face by not attending school, especially “How will my children get into college or find work without a proper school transcript?” and “How will my children socialize if they’re not in school?” The COVID-19 pandemic made these questions pertinent to every parent, not just to those considering homeschooling. Further, headlines such as “Research Shows Students Falling Months Behind During Virus Disruptions” and “‘A Lost Generation’: Surge of Research Reveals Students Sliding Backward, Most Vulnerable Worst Affected” exacerbated our fears about children falling behind in school and therefore in life, causing further anxiety in families.

Don’t let the hype upset you; your children will continue to learn and grow whether or not they are in school. Homeschoolers matriculate in and out of school, get into college, and find work they want to do without running through school’s curricular gauntlet. Our lives and careers often do not run in the same patterns as educational institutions, or as we, ourselves, wish. Missing months or years of standard school learning does not take an equivalent amount of time to regain, if one needs to learn it at all.

Education is an important element of civil society, but it has become a sedentary institution, serving much more as a gatekeeper for employment opportunities instead of enabling active learning for students. Both in-person and online education continue to operate on the assumption that by exposing all children to the same information at the same time they will learn it. This core belief is hard to shake: generations of school reforms to make schooling more personalized have tried it and failed. Ivan Illich summarized this situation in The Futility of Schooling (1968): “And yet it is politically inexpedient and intellectually disreputable to question the elusive goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all citizens by giving them access to an equal number of years in school.”

To even question the order in which school subjects are taught is to invite being labeled naïve or an enemy of education. For instance, in school the main reason for making sure children can read by the end of third grade is school management issues, not a child’s biological development. In puberty, hair growth is spontaneous and happens to all healthy children over a range of time; there is no equivalent biological process in our bodies that triggers “You will learn to read now.” Reading is a learned behavior, and forcing someone to learn something they don’t want to do can actually delay or impede learning.

However, the curriculum after third grade requires competent reading skills to succeed in school. Homeschoolers have long noted, and research shows, that when children are not forced to learn to read at home, boys tend to learn to read later than girls do. Once a child decides to learn to read, they learn quickly, catching up to their age-mates’ reading abilities in weeks or months, not years. Further, the studies show that children who haven’t been compelled to read due to their age, read more for personal pleasure and information as they get older than do those who were forced to learn to read at a particular age. There are many different paths and texts that turn people into readers, not just school’s path.

For Your Interest

Common Objections to Homeschooling, Chapter 3 from the 1981 edition of Teach Your Own, is available to read for free here. Scroll down the page until your reach the Common Objections headline. This chapter was cut from the 2021 edition because we needed room for new material and most of those objections are not so common today, as homeschooling has become more accepted.