Presented by Patrick Farenga on May 1, 2020 at “The Disinformation Campaign Against Homeschooling” conference: https://vimeo.com/414119373

Good afternoon. I’m Patrick Farenga, author and publisher of books and articles about how children learn outside of school and the president of JohnHoltGWS. GWS stands for Growing Without Schooling, the magazine John Holt founded in 1977 and that I published until it ceased in 2001. I’ve worked in the homeschooling movement since 1981 and, with my wife, homeschooled our three daughters.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a time of isolation and introspection for us as individuals and as a nation. However, the closing of our schools has added a new pressure to our lives: parents must administer daily school lessons to their children while they are also figuring out how to work from home or how to cope with their loss of work. The schools, like everyone, were caught off guard by the pandemic and teachers are repurposing their daily lessons for the internet. But not everyone has internet access, lessons made for the classroom don’t easily convert to web-based instruction, and few parents appear to have the patience or knowledge to help their children with their school assignments. This situation is further exacerbated by schools and the media referring to this as homeschooling, which it is not. People who choose to homeschool do so after they give careful thought to how they are going to work and live together as a family. What is occurring is remote learning and crisis schooling, not homeschooling.

Not all children learn in school despite the best efforts of good teachers. The author John Holt pondered this at length during his years as a fifth-grade teacher and in his first book, How Children Fail. Holt noticed that not only did the poor students not learn, but the good students often didn’t really learn either. Holt called this process a “charade of learning” that occurs even in the best schools. Holt wrote, “The only difference between a good student and a bad student is the good one is careful not to forget what they studied until after the test.” Today, more evidence of this is provided by the number of adults scouring the internet to relearn how to multiply fractions, properly spell words, or diagram sentences to teach their children at home. Learning is context sensitive, and if it is perceived as useless or unpleasant by the learner, it is unlikely that learning will remain in their minds.

Like many other school reformers, past and present, Holt urged smaller schools and classes, more diverse teachers and subject matter, encouragement of interdisciplinary thinking, and plenty of free play for children. But the grind of industrial education pulverizes these options as too costly or too romantic.

After seeing how his and other’s efforts at school reform in the 1960s were not well received by educators, Holt came to the idea that parents could use their homes as a base for their children’s learning. Using their personal contacts and community resources, homeschooling parents act as general contractors for their children’s learning, not the sole instructor. Today, with the internet and other media, there are even more opportunities for locating such help.

Holt didn’t like the word “homeschooling” because the learning he was talking about didn’t have to take place at home nor follow school curricula. He coined the term “unschooling” to describe this way of learning. Holt felt schools and homeschoolers could cooperate for each other’s benefit and that schools could learn a lot about how children learn by observing and working with homeschoolers.

Homeschoolers have seen their eclectic approach help their children find work, contribute to society, and get into and graduate from college if that’s their goal. Homeschoolers with very unconventional educations have gotten into higher education, including Harvard and other Ivy League schools.

As homeschooling gained adherents and publicity throughout the late 1970s, schools and their supporters actively pushed back to make homeschooling illegal. Homeschooling was not illegal in the US nor specifically legal, so Holt encouraged parents to stay out of court if possible. “I see no point in confronting the authorities if you can dodge them,” Holt said. But he also advised homeschoolers to hold their ground if they do go to court. Based on state and supreme court rulings that support educational choice and parental rights Holt advised that parents “have the right to educate their children in whatever way they believe in; the state cannot impose on all parents any kind of educational monopoly of schools, methods, or whatever.” (Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) and Farrington v. Tokushige (1927))

 This interpretation was later upheld and expanded in a Massachusetts homeschooling court case in 1978. (Perchemlides v. Frizzle). Holt cites three more legal supports that are important for homeschoolers.

1. The state may not deprive parents of the right to educate their children as they see fit for arbitrary reasons, but only for serious educational ones, which it must make known to parents, with all the forms of due process. (Perchemlides v. Frizzle and Michigan v. Nobel (1979))

2. A state that would deny parents these rights for arbitrary reasons by saying that their home education plan is inadequate has a burden of proof to show beyond a reasonable doubt that this is so. Parents are assumed to be competent to teach their children until proved otherwise. This Assumption of Competence is kin to and part of the general Assumption of Innocence (of the accused) which hold in all criminal proceedings (State of Iowa v. Sessions, 1978).

3. In order to prove that the parents’ education plans are inadequate, the state must show that its own requirements, regulations, etc. are educationally necessary and do in fact produce, in its own schools, better results than the parents get or are likely to get. (Hinton et al. v. Kentucky (1978); also Nobel.)

The issue of child abuse at home has been raised as a reason to force homeschooled children into public schools. In 1981 Holt wrote, “When legislators passed laws saying that the state could, for neglect, remove children from the custody of their parents, what they had in mind was children who were starved, or left naked, or were brutally beaten and tortured, or locked in closets, or chained to furniture. They did not have in mind the children of conscientious and devoted parents whose only crime was that they did not approve of the kind of education offered in the local schools. To lump such parents with gross abusers of children, as schools have quite often done already, is a most serious perversion of law and justice.”

Today, Elizabeth Bartholet, Director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, seeks to ban homeschooling on the grounds that “homeschooling violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, [and] keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.”

I have briefly addressed her mistaken ideas that homeschooling does not provide a meaningful education to children and how grown-up homeschoolers find work worth doing and contribute positively to society. Now I will explore her charges regarding child abuse and democracy.

Tara Westover’s excellent and moving memoir, Educated, is used as a cudgel by Bartholet to show how cruel homeschooling can be. What needs to be stated clearly, and Westover does so repeatedly in her book, is that the neglect and physical abuse she suffered was a result of her father and brother’s mental illnesses, and their erratic domination over the family. Some people, including her grandmother, try to rescue Westover from the crazy home she is in, but it isn’t easy for a child to leave their parents, and it takes her many years before she can make a clean break from her family. Though homeschooling provided a cover story for her parents to keep her home, it was not the cause or reason for her abuse. Westover notes in her book that her older brother, who also left the family due to their abusive family situation, successfully homeschooled his children; she does not blame homeschooling for her plight.

In addition to being physically abused, Westover’s parents’ religious beliefs prevented her from attending college, demanding instead that she be a wife and mother. This is also a clear violation of her rights as a person, let alone an American citizen. A person has the right to control and direct their own thoughts and learning and to speak them publicly. Holt describes this right as flowing from the First Amendment.

“A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you but about what interests and concerns us.”

To create a law that requires people to attend only school to prevent potential child abuse not only infringes everyone’s educational freedom, it doesn’t address abuse directly. It merely puts the child in school and closes alternatives to school. This doesn’t address children whose abuse is not detected by mandated reporters, nor does it address the physical abuse of children in public and private schools. Instead of using education as a workaround to protect children from abuse, let’s grant all children the same protection adults have under the Bill of Rights: If an adult is physically beaten by someone, they have legal recourse to get redress. The real threat of a court case, fines, and jail keeps many from throwing punches when they want to do so.

However, our society views children as a special exception to this rule of law. Wikipedia notes, in 1977’s case in Ingraham v. Wright, “the US Supreme Court held that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment did not apply to disciplinary corporal punishment in public schools. … As of 2018, corporal punishment is still legal in private schools in every U.S. state except New Jersey and Iowa, legal in public schools in nineteen states, permitted in eighteen, and practiced in fifteen.”

(Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_the_United_States).

A good number of parents choose to homeschool because of the bullying or mistreatment their children receive in public and private schools.

Another concern about homeschooling is that it undermines democracy because homeschooled children will not learn the skills needed to participate in our democracy. The idea that compulsory, conventional schooling is needed to make proper citizens is fraught with contradictions. For instance, nowhere is it stated in our founding documents that all citizens need to be processed in public schools to participate in our democracy. Also, in the words of Ruth Sherman, a homeschooling mother in NY from 1920, who, when asked how her son would learn about democracy if she removed him from public school, replied: “You can’t learn democracy in a place where it isn’t practiced.” Finally, some alternative schools allow children to completely participate in their school’s governance in direct contrast to mainstream schooling.

We are in the midst of a quarantine and the rise of domestic abuse is more likely, so we need to create protections for children that go beyond school attendance. The pandemic is forcing us to reintegrate children into our lives and schooling is likely to be very different for a while. We need all the tools we have as a society to get through this, and homeschoolers have yeears of experience they can share about living and learning with children. Rather than ban homeschooling, particularly in this time of quarantine, educators and parents should be talking with homeschoolers about how learning can be conceived and assessed more broadly, and how children should be treated with the same dignity and respect we give adults.

Unschooling and Creativity: Trusting Ourselves to Learn

Presented by Patrick Farenga at the Berklee School of Music Symposium for Interconnected Arts and Music Performance, Dec. 8, 2018.

This website platform can’t handle footnotes. You can download this free pdf to read the article with all its footnotes and references in place.

I want to thank the Symposium for Interconnected Arts and Music Performance for inviting me to address the issue of creativity and music from the perspective of learning outside of school. I have worked in the field of alternative education for more than 36 years, specifically with families who help their children learn without attending conventional schooling. My wife and I unschooled our three daughters, who are now ages 31, 29, and 26, and I worked at Growing Without Schooling magazine from 1981 until it ceased publication in 2001. I continue to write, speak, and consult with people around the world who want to encourage children’s self-directed learning.

From the moment we are born, we are all self-directed learners—all healthy babies learn to walk, talk, and socialize without formal lessons and, if they are allowed to continue to grow and learn in a safe environment with welcoming adults they also learn to read, write, calculate and investigate the world without being taught. It is hard for us to remember that children were part of the fabric of daily life in communities throughout the world from the beginning of humankind. It is only since around 1850, less than 200 years ago, that school became the primary place for children to learn and grow. Today, most people believe that school is a necessity not just for teaching the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also for finding work worth doing and developing one’s abilities throughout their entire lives. This formula creates a situation where people are judged by how well they fit into school, rather than fitting the school to the student. For many students, this means they need to subdue their personal, intrinsic motivations for learning in order to reap the rewards of what school wants them to learn.

My friend and mentor, the late teacher and author John Holt, coined the word unschooling to describe how people learn if they don’t attend a school or use school methods at home.

A fifth-grade, private school teacher for many years, John Holt’s first books urged teachers to give children control over their learning in their classrooms. Over time, John sought other words to describe learning that happens naturally for people all the time, in contrast to learning motivated by school pressure. Homeschooling became the settled term for learning without going to school, but John didn’t like it because it implied that you should turn your home into a school and that’s where all the learning takes place.

Unschooling is a modern gerund, but the word unschooled is really quite old. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its first use in 1594 and defines it as:

1. Uneducated, untaught. b.) Not educated at school; not made to attend school.

2. Untrained, undisciplined. b.) Not affected or made artificial by education; natural, spontaneous.

3. Not provided with a school.

John Holt wanted to bring out the second, less popular meanings of unschooled: Not educated at school; not made to attend school; not affected or made artificial by education; natural, spontaneous. Over the years, as the public increasingly used the word “homeschooling,” Holt moved away from using unschooling in his writing and work and used homeschooling as the more generally understood term for learning without going to school.

Why talk about not going to school in a talk about creativity? Don’t you have to learn how to be creative in school? Don’t you have to learn all the rules before you can break them? Don’t you need a college degree to be creative, find a job, and be a success?

Despite the many products, teachers, and seminars that claim their materials and insights will make you creative there is no evidence that creativity can be taught. An article in Psychology Today sums the research up nicely:

“Creativity is not simply a set of skills. Creativity is not simply familiarity with a set of behaviors or facility with a set of pre-fab strategies. Creativity is not simply a body of knowledge. Creativity only manifests when a person with the right sets of skills and knowledge invents or finds an appropriate problem that cannot be solved using any existing approach, but which is amenable to solution by that person's unique set of experiences. You never know who is going to hit that jackpot. You only know that some people have embarked on the quest.”

More to the point of this symposium, British researchers studied musical creativity and found that musicians may be most creative when not actually playing an instrument. The Guardian newspaper reports, “By studying musicians and asking them when inspiration struck them, researchers found that breakthrough moments often happened when players were humming to themselves or tapping out rhythms on the table or imagining dance moves inspired by the music. ‘What we are finding is that even fairly mundane activities can feed in to the discovery of new insight, new knowledge and new means of expressing ideas in all sorts of ways,’ said John Rink, professor of musical performance studies at Cambridge University. ‘The potential is infinite … Developing a creative voice takes time,’ said Rink. ‘It takes experimentation, patience and there may be no predictable course of development that one can expect to follow. You never really know when creative insight will be achieved or how to get it, but prolonged consideration, trial and error, and concentration are all very much part of it … it is a lifelong journey. It never really ends.’”

Given the unpredictable and intensely personal aspects of creativity, is it any wonder that the factory model that schools are based on emphasize standardization and conformity, which are much more easily quantified and measured for grading purposes?

John Holt was, in his own words, a conventional teacher who taught in private schools in Colorado and Boston. But he saw, over time as he taught, that his conventional ways of teaching were not helping children retain meaningful lessons. Based on his experiences John wrote his first book, How Children Fail, and it has remained in print since it appeared in 1964. Essentially, John learned that schooling and education are not the same as learning in the flow of life. In fact, since most students forget what they learned after the test is taken and most teachers must keep the class moving forward, John called what goes on in the classroom a charade of learning. John became a bestselling author with that first book, but after working to change schools from within in the sixties and seventies, he decided to support people who wanted to learn outside of school and work with them to create different ways of helping children learn and grow. In 1977, Holt founded Growing Without Schooling magazine, and the modern homeschooling movement was now on record. Holt was an avid observer and thoughtful commentator about children and learning, and this passage from an article he wrote in Growing Without Schooling sums up his philosophy well:

“Babies do not learn in order to please us, but because it’s their instinct and nature to want to find out about the world. If we praise them for everything they do, after a while they are going to start learning, doing things, just to please us, and the next step is that they are going to become worried about not pleasing us. They’re going to become just as afraid of doing the wrong thing as they might have been if they had been faced with the threat of punishment.”

Intellectually this made sense to me as a single man, but it wasn’t until my wife and I had our first child, Lauren, that I realized how an intellectual understanding of how things work is totally different from a personal understanding of how the same things work. For instance, when Lauren was nearing two years old her favorite toy was a metal Slinky.

I always liked playing with a Slinky as a child—I was fascinated by how I could push it off the top step of our stairs and it would slink its way down. I also loved the feeling and sound of moving the Slinky from hand to hand, watching it jump in an arc from my right hand to my left. But no matter how often I shared my ways of playing with the Slinky, Lauren seemed unimpressed and preferred her own way: She would take the Slinky from me and put it in her mouth and then toddle around with it dangling in front of her.

My wife and I started to worry: Was Lauren not capable of using a simple toy the way it was intended? Did Lauren have a learning disability—Slinky Deficit Disorder? So one night, while I was cleaning up the kitchen, I found the Slinky on the floor. I thought about Lauren and decided I would put it in my mouth and walk around the kitchen like her—and the Slinky sounded like chimes in my ears!

What I perceived about her behavior was not conforming to what I thought she should be learning and doing with that Slinky, and I kept thinking, as a responsible parent, that I had to intervene and make Lauren use the toy the way it is shown in commercials and in their instructions. Fortunately, I was able to put myself in Lauren’s baby shoes for a bit and it made me grasp what John Holt was talking about.

Children learn because they want to, not because they want to please us.

I couldn’t make Lauren use the Slinky the way I thought it should be used, but fortunately I didn’t step over the boundary and MAKE her use it the way I wanted her to. I didn’t yell, or sulk, or make remarks that indicated I was disappointed that she couldn’t play with the Slinky like every other child I knew. I offered her another way, she said no, and since she was in no serious danger with her activity, I let her indulge in walking with a Slinky clenched in her teeth. Her Slinky project only lasted a couple of weeks, by the way. But it made an impression on me, and I’ve learned to be much more careful about judgments I make about why people act as they do based on just my own knowledge and a few observations.

Yet, adults do this all the time. We see a five-year-old throw a ball well and we think they should be an athlete; we see a 10-year-old finish reading a long novel and we think they are smart: We project upon children a lot of what we hope and desire for them, and this can warp our relationships about what children truly want to do and learn.

We need to be in less of a rush to get children launched into adulthood and instead enjoy and appreciate their childhood while they are in it. That’s a big reason homeschooling has grown over the years—school now takes a much larger amount of time and effort from families and children than it did twenty years ago. The school day has gotten longer and added more instruction while cutting recess, art, music, sports, theater, and other subjects that are not viewed as being important by educators, and we keep extending the number of years children must attend school, with some proposals for schooling to start at two years old and extending attendance until one is 18. There are even proposals for mandatory continuing education for adults—womb-to-tomb compulsory schooling.

Meanwhile, more than two million children in the United States are currently being taught at home and in their local communities and the number keeps growing. Many who choose to homeschool begin by duplicating school in their homes, and while this works for some families, most families who homeschool eventually loosen their devotion to the school curriculum and start using their children’s interests and questions to explore the world—they become unschoolers.

High achievement in school doesn’t mean you are more creative or even generally smarter than those with less school achievements—it can also mean you’re just good at the game of school. We’ve conflated school degrees with creativity and intelligence, and this creates a sense of worthlessness for those who are not good at the school game. John Holt and other education reformers have noted how schooling actually constrains learning for many students. This summary of a longitudinal study of creativity, puts that comment in perspective:

“In 1968, George Land conducted a research study to test the creativity of 1,600 children ranging in ages from three-to-five years old who were enrolled in a Head Start program. This was the same creativity test he devised for NASA to help select innovative engineers and scientists. The assessment worked so well he decided to try it on children. He re-tested the same children at 10 years of age, and again at 15 years of age. The results were astounding.

Test results amongst 5 year olds: 98%

Test results amongst 10 year olds: 30%

Test results amongst 15 year olds: 12%

Same test given to 280,000 adults: 2%

“What we have concluded,” wrote Land, “is that non-creative behavior is learned.”

Years earlier than Land, based on his experiences as a teacher and observer of children, John Holt noted in his book How Children Fail, “School is the place where children learn to be stupid.”

More recently, in her book Wounded by School, Kirsten Olson wanted to know how high-achieving adults were positively influenced by their school experiences. What Olson learned is that these adults were successful in spite of their schooling! In her forward to the book, educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot writes: “In her first foray into the field—in-depth interviews with an award-winning architect, a distinguished professor, a gifted writer, a marketing executive—Olson expected to hear stories of joyful and productive learning … Instead, she discovered the shadows of pain, disappointment, even cynicism in their vivid recollections of schooling. Instead of the light she expected, she found darkness. And their stories did not merely refer to old wounds now healed; they recalled deeply embedded wounds that still bruised and ached, wounds that still compromised and distorted their sense of themselves as persons and professionals.”

School makes us focus on discrete disciplines on a fixed schedule: an hour of math, an hour of science, and so on. This works for professional, scientific management purposes, but for learning it is often deadly. An hour of math may not be enough for students who are into the topic, and an hour is way too much for students who are not into it. But it doesn’t matter to school officials: everyone must get an hour of math.

John Taylor Gatto, another schoolteacher and author who became an unschooling advocate, wrote that this displacement of intrinsic learning is not a bug in the system but a feature based on the industrial-production model schools use:

“Educated people, or people with principles, represent rogue elements in a scheme of scientific management; the former are suspect because they have been trained to argue effectively and to think for themselves, the latter too inflexible in any area touching their morality to remain reliably dependent. At any moment they may announce, “This is wrong. I won’t do it.” Overly creative people have similar deficiencies from a systems point of view.

“Scientific management is always on guard against people who don’t fit securely into boxes, whether because of too much competency, too much creativity, too much popularity, or what have you. Although often hired, it is with the understanding they must be kept on a short leash and regarded warily. The ideal hireling is reflexively obedient, cheerfully enthusiastic about following orders, ever eager to please. Training begins in the first grade with the word ‘don’t.’”

Another way our intrinsic motivations to learn and experiment get warped or destroyed by school is when the teacher–student relationship gets unbalanced. Ivan Illich, the author of Deschooling Society and other important books about modern culture, wrote, “The teacher–student relationship is a special one and should not occupy more than a small part of life.” But for some students, at all levels of education, their need to please the teacher, and the teacher’s encouragement of that need, can cause the relationship to become toxic, even abusive. The movie Whiplash is an example of how the need to please a popular music teacher can displace and ruin real learning and personal growth for a student.

John Holt wrote a book, titled Never Too Late, about his experiences as an adult learning to play the cello. In a section called “Learning without Lessons,” Holt writes: “The trouble with most teachers of music or anything else, is that they have in the back of their minds an idea more or less like this: ‘Learning is and can only be the result of teaching. Anything important my students learn, they learn because I teach it to them.’ Teachers make this belief clear by the way they teach, or talk about their teaching, or react—usually with anger—to the suggestion that their students might find out for themselves, and be better for finding out, much of what they are being taught. It is not enough for them to be helpful and useful to their students; they need to feel that their students could not get along without them.

“All my own work as teacher and learner has led me to believe quite the opposite, that teaching is a very strong medicine, which like all strong medicines can quickly and easily turn into a poison. At the right time (that is, when the student has asked for it) and in very small doses, it can indeed help learning. But at the wrong time, or in too large doses, it will shut down learning or prevent it altogether. The right kind of teacher can be a great help to a learner, particularly of music. The wrong kind can be worse than none.”

What Holt and similar educators emphasize is the value of relationships and feelings as we live and learn, not the value of certificates and trophies. How we feel about something is deeply important to our motivation to learn about it, but in school we are supposed to put aside our feelings about people and things and just focus on getting through the day’s curriculum. Illich ruefully noted how schools prepare children to be part of an impersonal workforce by making them alienated to their work in school.

The man-made, global competition to have the most educated nation, meaning the population that possesses the most college degrees, is currently being won by China, but the Chinese have a creativity problem: Their graduates are great at following their team leader’s instructions, but not so good at coming up with new solutions to problems. In an article, “How China Kills Creativity”, Jiang Xueqin writes, “But ultimately, the most harmful thing that a Chinese school does, from a creativity perspective, is the way in which it separates emotion from memory by making learning an unemotional experience. … Whatever individual emotions Chinese students try to bring into the classroom, they are quickly stamped out. As I have previously written, from the first day of school, students who ask questions are silenced and those who try to exert any individuality are punished. What they learn is irrelevant and de-personalized, abstract and distant, further removing emotion from learning. If any emotion is involved, it’s pain. But the pain is so constant and monotonous (scolding teachers, demanding parents, mindless memorization, long hours of sitting in a cramped classroom) that it eventually ceases to be an emotion.”

For more examples of how schools kill creativity, I urge you to watch Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on YouTube: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

So, if creativity is unpredictable, can’t be taught and diminishes in school, what can we do to become creative musicians and people?

It turns out, I learned the answer from my daughter Lauren and her Slinky, only I didn’t recognize it until many years later: the way we nurture creativity is to play. Lauren discovered a creative way to play with a Slinky that I never thought of, but instead of seeing it as an innovative use of the Slinky I viewed it as a lack of understanding on how to play with the toy properly.

Dr. Peter Gray, in his research on self-directed learning among children, writes, “Albert Einstein, who apparently hated school, referred to his achievements in theoretical physics and mathematics as ‘combinatorial play.’ A great deal of research has shown that people are most creative when infused by the spirit of play, when they see themselves as engaged in a task just for fun. As the psychologist Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard Business School, has shown in her book Creativity in Context (1996) and in many experiments, the attempt to increase creativity by rewarding people for it or by putting them into contests to see who is most creative has the opposite effect. It’s hard to be creative when you are worried about other people’s judgments. In school, children’s activities are constantly being judged. School is a good place for learning to do just what someone else wants you to do; it’s a terrible place for practicing creativity.”

If you don’t learn how to be creative in school, then what makes people creative?

Neuroscience tells us that certain regions of the brain activate together during creative moments, but if and how creativity can be taught as a result of this information is not clear at all. An article about current brain research on creativity claims that “a crucial trigger of creativity is the experience of unusual and unexpected events.” My first reaction to this was, “It took a research study to establish this?”

Artists, intellectuals, and avid travelers have long known and written about how novel experiences excite the imagination: Is it any wonder that so many musicians, from Dvorak to Miles Davis, were inspired to compose music based on their travels? There’s only one way to experience unusual and unexpected events, and that’s to disrupt your routines and comfort zones, something that travel can facilitate. Of course, you don’t have to travel to experience unusual and unexpected events, as Lauren’s Slinky shows. Here are other examples.

Thelonious Monk said his first piano was a player piano: “I saw how the rolls made the keys move. Very interesting. Sounded pretty good to me. I felt I did not want to waste this person’s gift, so I learned to use it.” Author Robert Doershuck writes about Monk practicing at home with, “a mirror [had been] mounted on the ceiling over the piano to reflect the rise and fall of the piano hammers, the shifting of the dampers, as he played. The visual balance, as well as the sounds, pleased him.” The visual, tactile, and sound qualities of the piano attracted young Thelonious to play it, not parental or school demands. I must also mention, it was his sense of relationship and respect for the person who gave his family the piano that also made him desire to learn more about it. I suspect deep learning and creativity arise more from these moments of human kindness than from no excuses, high-pressure school environments. And though Monk did study formal piano technique and repertoire, he noted that he began teaching himself how to play “as soon as they rolled the old upright into the door.” Further, it was Monk’s sister who first got the piano lessons, not him. That didn’t stop him from listening to his sister’s lesson, observing how she played, and learning to read music. Monk said, “I learned how to read before I took lessons, watching my sister practice her lessons, over her shoulder.”

The combination of self-teaching and a multidimensional approach to music are hallmarks of Monk’s work, but that is also how so many young people learn when they are not forced into competitive learning. Children—all of us—are learning all the time from our environment, our thoughts, and our actions, and our creativity is stirred by all those elements.

Prodigies, like Mozart and Joey Alexander, are not common, but creativity is.

Everyday people are creative. Creativity in music doesn’t automatically mean you are creative in the kitchen, or with computer code. Genetics and environment are not destiny: in my many years of helping families homeschool I’ve encountered many unmusical parents—meaning parents who didn’t play instruments or listen to music avidly—who nonetheless had very musical children. I’ve also encountered highly musical parents whose children prefer carpentry or science for their careers.

For instance, Nancy and Bob Wallace were homeschoolers and neither considered themselves musical. When they moved into a rented house there was an old piano there that their son Ishmael fell in love with it. His younger sister, Vita, also developed a passion for music, though her instrument soon became the violin. It is important to note that neither child just played music all day; doll and toy play, games, outdoor activities, visits with neighbors, also filled their days. Neither went to school until they entered music school in their teens. Both are now adult classical musicians living and working in Manhattan.

I recently spoke with two young jazz musicians who were unschooled for all or part of their schooling. Miro Sprague came from a musical family (“There were lots of hand drums in our house” he noted), and his dad gave him a recording of Kind of Blue one Christmas that he fell in love with. Miro tried to figure out how to play those tunes on the piano, and the concept of improvisation really impressed him from this album, and he wanted to know how he could do improvise, too.

School didn’t fit Miro’s personality: he describes his younger self as having a stubborn, wanting to do things his own way temperament. But he didn’t get seriously into music until he left conventional school. From the beginning, Miro said school gave him the feeling of “Why should I be learning what these people dictate what I should learn? I learn, just at my own pace… it didn’t make sense to me.” When he was in seventh grade he asked his parents if he could leave school and attend North Star, a self-directed learning center for teens near his home in Western Massachusetts. Becoming a homeschooler and enrolling in North Star gave Miro a lot more time: “My passion was ignited and I was able to go for it and spend a lot of time just playing. At first I taught myself, then my dad gave me a self-teaching piano book. Then he recommended I take lessons. I was resistant to that because of my school experience, but the piano teacher lived up the road and I started lessons with him after six or seven months of being at home. He gave me little composition assignments at our second lesson.” After a year with this teacher, Miro was playing 6 to 8 hours a day and he wanted to study with a serious jazz piano teacher. Eugene Newman, at the VT Jazz Center in Brattleboro, became his next teacher, and Miro’s parents drove him across state lines every week for his lessons. Miro didn’t return to school until he entered the Manhattan School of Music as an undergraduate. After he graduated, he attended the Thelonious Monk Institute at UCLA and now works as a full-time jazz musician and composer.

Claire Dickson, who never attended elementary or high school, is a senior at Harvard, double majoring in music and psychology. Like Miro, she comes from a musical family and was encouraged, but never pushed, to learn music. Claire discovered her passion for singing when she was young: she liked the physical feeling and emotional outlet vocalizing gave her. When she was 12 she discovered Ella Fitzgerald and vocal improvisation and was deeply moved. She eventually asked her parents for formal voice lessons. A few years later, Claire was singing in jazz clubs around Boston while others her age were cramming for exams. For Claire, music is a part of her life, but not her whole life. She said, “I always want to have the option of narrowing my focus and not have the environment narrow it.” As a composer, Claire is open to inspiration from everywhere, and enjoys co-composing with a colleague. She notes how she uses voice memos on her phone to record ideas she gets as she walks; she finds this encourages her flow state and maintains her playfulness without making her think about what she is recording.

Both Claire and Miro note the incredible value of time that they were given by being homeschooled. We’ve all heard that it takes about 10,000 hours of doing something before you become truly adept at it. Claire emphasized to me: “It is important to take advantage of the time and space of not being in school. You need to use the school when you need to, instead of it using you.”

Miro said, “Not being in a conventional school I had a lot more time. My passion was ignited and I was able to go for it and spend a lot of time just playing.”

In today’s world, we think every great discovery must be attributed to a school or a scholar and that to live a creative life one needs a foundation grant, a patron, or to become independently wealthy. Let me share a few more stories to remind you of what ordinary people are capable of creating without going to school.

Here is the great pianist Mary Lou Williams, quoted on a record album jacket, Jazz Women: A Feminist Retrospective:

“I have to give my mother credit here. She used to tell the story that I was a nervous child. To keep me out of mischief, she held me on her lap while she played an old fashioned pump organ that she had at home. One day my hands beat hers to the keyboard and I picked out a melody. She was so surprised she dropped me on the floor and ran to get the neighbors to come and hear me. That was the beginning and from that time on (I was three) I never left the piano. She never let a teacher near me. She had studied and all she could do was read. She couldn’t improvise on her own at all. So instead, she did a very good thing. She had professional playing musicians come to the house and play for me. …. Some days I’d stay at the piano twelve hours. I didn’t stop to eat or anything—sometimes I’d drink just a glass of water.”

George Coleman is an iconic tenor saxophone player. In an interview, it was noted: “Coleman began his journey in Memphis, Tenn., in 1935. He took up alto and was already gigging as a teenager with B.B. King in the early ‘50s. He learned basic music theory in high school but was essentially self-taught: for knowledge, he turned to Memphis musicians such as arranger Ozzie Horne, piano modernist Bob Tally and stride pianist Eugene Barlow, among others. “The stuff that guys were learning at Berklee,” says Coleman, “I knew when I was about 17 or 18 years old.”

Please don’t think that just jazz musicians from the old days learned without, or in spite of, school. As I noted earlier, many successful people feel school was a constraint on their intellectual and creative development. Here’s an example from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was invited to give a commencement address at his elementary school but refused. In a New Yorker profile he recalled telling the administration:

“I am where I am not because of what happened in school but in spite of it, and it probably is not what you want me to say. Call me back, and I will address your teachers and give them a piece of my mind.” A more important education came from his parents … Tyson’s mother gave him a pair of folding opera glasses, which provided his first magnified look at the night sky. In middle school, he bought a telescope with money that he earned by walking neighbors’ dogs—"It was the golden age of dog walking, because you didn’t have to clean up after them," he recalls—and studied the sky from the roof of his apartment building. In his bedroom, he arranged glow-in-the-dark stars in the shape of constellations.”

Gunther Schuller was the head of the New England Conservatory during the 1960s and 1970s and a noted jazz musician. Schuller didn’t get interested in music until he was 12. In his speech at the New England Conservatory Centennial Dinner, he addressed himself to this point:

“Forgive me for becoming autobiographical for a moment, but I do it only to make a point. I stand before you as one of the original dropouts. I do not have any degrees, and I do not have even a high school diploma. Now I’m not advocating this necessarily as a road to higher education, and I am aware of the fact that times have changed tremendously in the twenty-four years since I left high school. But I have the feeling I would not have been a very good music student in, for example, the rigid programs which allow for almost no electives, which some of our schools demand.”

As I noted earlier, it is difficult to hold on to original thinking and remain creative in a society that demands obedience to authority and rewards standardization and mass production. Thelonious Monk didn’t get truly appreciated until towards the end of his life, and the same is true for any number of creative people: Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Alan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Galileo, or from the last half of the 20th century, musician Nick Drake, comic book artist Jack Kirby, and sci-fi author Philip Dick. All these people struggled to create their works and earn a living and it wasn’t until after they died that they actually earned recognition, and royalties, for their works. Most creative people care if someone positively recognizes their work, but they continue to create even if fame and fortune avoids them. They aren’t creating because they want to please a teacher or an audience—they create because there is something inside them that must be articulated and until they do so to their satisfaction, they are compelled to try, over and over.

Which brings us back to our common ground: we were all babies once, we were all beginners at our instruments once—we were all self-motivated to try to do something, over and over. In his book, Never Too Late, John Holt describes the technical aspects of learning the cello as a middle-age adult, but he also delves into the emotions and ideas that music brings up for him as he learns the cello. Even though he was learning on his own, with some private lessons, John kept comparing himself to his fellow musicians and found himself lacking.

“A voice in my mind began to say, ‘What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing but quarter and eighth notes, you ought at least be able to play them right.’ Of course, these thoughts only made me play worse. After a short while I took hold of myself, and began to say to that scolding voice in my mind, ‘Shut up; what difference does it make what they can do, or what I ought to be able to do? I am doing the best I can, and that is all I can do.’ After silencing that scolding voice, I said to my playing self, ‘Don’t worry, do your best, you’ll get better.’

“… Once again the voice began to tell me that the music was easy and that I ought to be able to play it. Once again, I had to remind myself that ‘ought’ has nothing to do with it; if it was hard for me, then it was hard, that was all there was to it.”

Later in this chapter, John realizes how silly it was for him to berate himself for not playing what others could play easily:

“The baby learning to walk does not reproach himself every time he falls down. If he did, he would never learn to walk. . . . What I am slowly learning to do in my work with music is revive some of the resilient spirit of the exploring and learning baby. I have to accept at each moment, as a fact of life, my present skill or lack of skill, and do the best I can, without blaming myself for not being able to do better. I have to be aware of my mistakes and shortcomings without being ashamed of them. I have to keep in view the distant goal, without worrying about how far away it is or reproaching myself for not being already there. This is very hard for most adults. It is the main reason why we old dogs so often do find it so hard to learn new tricks, whether sports or languages or crafts or music. But if as we work on our skills we work on this weakness in ourselves, we can slowly get better at both.”

I always enjoy how John views learning holistically: by practicing our music we can also develop our personal growth—but we must consciously work at both. If you mindlessly spend an hour running through music exercises your fingers may get a workout, but did your brain and spirit get into the practice session too? Or were you going through your exercises with part of your mind thinking about dinner, or your next gig? You need to bring your focus and emotions to what you are doing in order to truly grow and understand yourself.

So, what does unschooling show us that can help those in school or who want to be more creative?

First, we need time to ourselves to nurture our own thoughts, experience things we want to explore or do, and to develop skills that further our personal goals. Make space in your life for your own thoughts and experiences to take root and grow. Carve out the time for self-reflection—such as daily walks or meditation—but self-reflection is also spontaneous and can occur at any time, so learn to recognize it when it happens. Like so many things in life, the more you do it the better you get at it—and self-reflection is a great way to learn from your mistakes.

Second, get away from your instrument and seek novel and unusual experiences: books, movies, museums, travel, crochet, bocci, barefoot running. You never know what might inspire your music: think of young Thelonious Monk watching the player piano keys move on their own, or looking at the mirror over his head as he made the piano hammers move: did the physical combinations of the hammers inspire Monk’s harmonic approach? All we know is that these things were important to Monk and he mentions them when asked about his piano playing. This is an interesting point about self-directed learning: only the learner can explain why they took a particular journey to learn something, and sometimes they can’t explain how or why they learned something anyway! Learning is also unconscious, subliminal, which is more evidence that we are learning all the time, not just when a teacher instructs us.

Related to getting away from your instrument are personal relationships. You might think that creative people only have a strong relationship to their art and don’t need or want others’ support, except as admirers. This is a stereotype of the creative genius, of course, and it was applied to Thelonious Monk often: He was described in the press as the high priest of bop, a lonely iconoclast, lost in his musical thoughts. If you learn about Monk’s life, you realize he fought against significant prejudice for being black, outspoken, and for the way he played piano; he also advised and befriended many people and musicians—notably, Bud Powell—and participated in benefits and protests to advance the civil rights movement throughout the 1950s and 60s. His wife, family, and friends were vital to keeping Monk from falling into despair, especially towards the end of his life when mental illness hit Monk hard. The romantic stereotype of the creative genius is a far cry from reality, especially for people of color. Do not neglect your personal relationships in pursuit of your creative muse; many artists gain inspiration and insight from their personal relationships, which, as all lovers and friends know, can also trigger creativity caused by unusual and unexpected events.

Finally, don’t let your schooling get in the way of your creativity. A good teacher teaches us how to teach ourselves. For instance, a good teacher won’t just tell you to relax when you play, they will tell and show you how to relax. We do sometimes need teachers when we want to learn something, but let me repeat that quote from Illich: “The teacher–student relationship is a special one and should not occupy more than a small part of life.”

John Holt echoes this throughout his work, especially in Never Too Late, where he writes,

“Most of all, I need the experience of playing for a critical listener, to get over any stage fright I might feel about that, and to learn to play my best under pressure—just as in sports. But even while giving me this help, the teacher must accept that he or she is my partner and helper and not my boss, that in this journey of musical exploration and adventure, I am the captain. Expert guides and pilots I can use, no doubt about it. But it is my expedition; I gain the most if it succeeds and lose the most if it fails, and I must remain in charge.”

Unschooling and letting the learner remain in charge of their learning is hard for many parents and teachers to appreciate, because it requires our trust and hope in the learner. Trust and hope are in scant supply in today’s increasingly transactional society. In his second book, How Children Learn, which celebrated its 50th year in print in 2018, John Holt wrote:

“All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words—Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this ‘reality,’ or saying bitterly, ‘If I could put up with it, they can too.’

“What we have to do is break this long downward cycle of fear and distrust, and trust children though we ourselves were not trusted. To do this will take a long leap of faith—but great rewards await any of us who will take that leap.”

I hope the stories and research I shared with you today give you more confidence to trust yourselves to be open to life and aware of all your learning, not just the learning you get credit for in school. As many unschoolers and self-taught musicians do, you can use school as needed to mold your own creations, instead of school treating you as a lump of clay to be molded.

Thank you.

The Foundations of Unschooling

My keynote speech to the Irish Unschooling Conference, May 2016, revised and edited for publication here.

Awakening Ourselves to New Possibilities in Education

An article I wrote for the Irish Unschooling Conference newsletter, April 2016.

There are some things that are universally true, such as all humans need healthy food, clean water, and good shelter to stay alive. Then there are things that we think are universally true, such as we must compel children to learn in school or else they will not function well in adult society. However, the education system that people all around the world are taught to believe in and support with their taxes, minds, and bodies is not vital to human existence, though you could never tell that from the intense marketing, social anxiety, and politics that surround school today.

There have been cultures and societies that made great advances in art, philosophy, and science without any schools as we know them now: Periclean Greece, Elizabethan England, and Colonial America before the revolution are three examples. In those times most children and adults learned from their parents, each other, and their local community. Perhaps an itinerant teacher would visit the village or town for a few weeks, but such schooling is nothing compared to modern-day education systems where every minute of the school day is measured and delivered to children in ever-increasing doses.

It is a modern-day heresy to say that schooling is not the same as education and that people can learn things in their own ways instead of attending school. But it is true, though a truth I didn’t fully understand until I started working with John Holt at Growing Without Schooling magazine in 1981. Like everyone my age, by going through the process of schooling I internalized all sorts of attitudes about grades, competition, doing meaningless or half-understood tasks, the importance of obedience to arbitrary authority, and so on that I only questioned later in my life. And, like most, I thought school just needed major improvements that would occur through more resources and smarter management. Working at Growing Without Schooling changed my view of that and made me realize that education reform is a way to misdirect the social reforms that are needed to improve peoples’ learning abilities, such as safe housing, healthy food, and salaries and wages that stabilize family finances.

John Holt once felt that schools could be improved but after years of advocating for changes in the classroom he decided that was not the right way to create better education. In his book Freedom and Beyond, Holt wrote:

Not long ago I would have defined the problem of educational reform as the problem of somehow getting much more freedom into our schools. If we could find a way to do that, we would have good education for all children. Now the problem seems larger: if schools exist we naturally want them to be better rather than worse. But it no longer seems to me that any imaginable sum of school reforms would be enough to provide good education for everyone or even for all children. People, even children, are educated much more by the whole society around them and the general quality of life in it than they are by what happens in schools. The dream of many school people, that schools can be places where virtue is preserved and passed on in a world otherwise empty of it, now seems to me a sad and dangerous illusion. It might have worked in the Middle Ages; it can’t work in a world of cars, jets, TV, and the mass media. Moreover, it seems clear from much experience that most adults will not tolerate too great a difference between the way they experience their own lives and the way their children live their lives in school. Even if the schools give up the idea that they should be preparing children for society as it is, and try instead to prepare them to live in or make a better society, they will not be allowed to go very far in that direction.

John Holt increasingly felt that the majority of adults don’t like or enjoy being around children and decided that rather than argue with the masses he would speak to those who were likeminded instead, and promote an alternative and give support to parents and other adults who wanted self-directed education for children. Giving children all the time they want to play, answering their questions respectfully, and having patience with their developing personalities and abilities are things every adult could do and John wanted to let people know that they didn’t have to wait for schools to change in order to help their children learn: you can do it yourself. Though a radical idea in 1977 when Holt first published Growing Without Schooling magazine, John was aware of people who homeschooled their children many years before then. One of them contacted John through GWS and I want to share her story.

Maire Mullarrney homeschooled her eleven children in Dublin during the 1950s and 1960s and she wrote about it in her book Anything School Can Do You Can Do Better, published in 1983. Some of her children had horrible experiences in school, which would have been worse had Maire not intervened and removed her children from the beatings they were receiving. Though she only taught them at home until they were eight or nine, she wished she taught them at home longer.

Maire and her husband had no formal teaching experience but were secure in their abilities to help their children learn and, influenced by Maria Montessori’s work, they were equally secure in their children’s abilities to learn on their own. Maire writes:

It should be evident form the first part of the book that I found staying home with interested children much more fun than either of the jobs I had beforehand.. It was the learning together that gave zest to the days …

After some eighteen quiet years of child-watching I had come to realize that school was a time-wasting and inefficient attempt to enable one generation to share knowledge with the next. When the elders felt the need to subdue the young by beating and humiliating them that went beyond mere inefficiency. It had not dawned on me that sharing knowledge was only a minor purpose of the system …

My friend Mario Pagnoni, an early author in the homeschooling world, often said all you need to homeschool successfully is love and a library card. So I find it is ironic that today, with books, libraries, computers, Internet, television, movies, plays, music, cellphones, tablets, and all our other means of communication, we still think children won’t learn anything unless a teacher feeds it to them out of a curriculum approved by the teacher’s superiors. Why do we feel so unempowered about our abilities to learn when our opportunities to consume information have increased so much? Can too much information have the paradoxical effect of stupefying us? How can we watch our children learn to walk, talk, and reason on their own as they grow from infancy into teenagers and not see that they are learning as much, if not more, from their environment, the things they do, the people they encounter, and the emotions they feel as they do from a formal lesson in a classroom? Indeed, as Holt and many other teachers and researchers have noted, school teaching often inhibits or prevents genuine learning.

Some people, when they’ve had enough failure with school, rather than double-down and push harder on it as the institution desires, question why they should do so. They consider other possibilities by questioning what’s going on: Are schools the best way to help all children learn and grow? Is there another way?

Maire Mullarney felt powerless to change schools from within and her family could not wait for schools to get better, so she took control as best she could and taught her children at home without ANY support from places we now take for granted, such as the Internet, public programs, or private schools and tutors. Other parents around the world did this throughout the early to mid-twentieth century too, and those who left a written record indicate their children did well as adults as a result of their nontraditional educations, not in spite of them.

There is plenty of research that supports informal learning, self-directed education, children learning on their in groups and since the 1980s the documented success of homeschooling continues to grow its numbers. Unschooling, a word coined by John Holt to mean learning that doesn’t take place at home nor resemble schooling, continues to grow in acceptance by conventional higher education and in general popularity. Slowly, some educational institutions are realizing that letting children grow up in a freer, more playful environment than school, particularly during their elementary school years, is more important than schooling. New possibilities for teaching and learning abound in the world, but in school they are constrained by rules and assumptions that deny agency to students and cause a charade of learning that more and more intensive testing only exacerbates, since what is answered correctly on a school test is soon forgotten once the test is over.

If school doesn’t seem right or isn’t working for your children, you can teach them yourself, just as Maire Mullarney did in the 1950s. You have the right to do so in Ireland and in many other countries. Except, unlike Maire and those who homeschooled in the previous century—like my family—you have the benefit of mass media, professional and public services, and local and online support. Don’t think you have no possible choices besides sending your child to school: What’s stopping you from trying homeschooling and unschooling?

Homeschooling

Article for the current online version of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Homeschooling and John Holt's Vision

The Challenges Homeschooling Presents to Social Science Research

How to Get an Education at Home

Written for John Taylor Gatto’s The Exhausted School and presented by Patrick Farenga at Carnegie Hall, New York City, on October 25, 1991.

There is a revolution going on in education, but it is not happening in schools. It is happening in the homes of American families in every state. It is happening every time a family decides to help its children learn at home instead of sending them to school. Fourteen years ago there were roughly 10,000 children being homeschooled; now there are upwards of 600,000 children learning at home [PF: 1.5 million in 2007 and still growing as of 2010]. If you and your children are not pleased with your schools and you are tired of waiting for them to change, then you can do something now and join the growing ranks of people who homeschool.

It is impossible to generalize about the "typical" homeschooling family anymore than you can about the "typical" family whose children attend schools. Homeschoolers include traditional, middle-class two parent households, single parents, low-income families, families with parents or children who have physical disabilities, and two income families. Some homeschool solely for religious reasons; some homeschool solely for pedagogical reasons. Many homeschool for mixtures of both reasons, and many others homeschool simply because they enjoy being with their children and watching them learn. Some homeschoolers live in rural communes; others live in midtown Manhattan. Some homeschooling parents have only high school diplomas, others have doctorates. It is not necessary to have a teaching certificate to homeschool effectively. None of these examples are conjectural; families homeschooling under these and other conditions have been writing to us at Growing Without Schooling [PF: We ceased publication in 2001 after 143 issues.] with their stories for over fourteen years. All sorts of people homeschool, and you can too.

You might think that homeschooled children are limited by their parents' expertise, experience, and knowledge. If we view teaching as the filling up of an empty bottle with the teacher's knowledge then this concern makes sense. With only one or two people pouring into the child's "bottle" it makes sense that the child will only learn what they pour in. However, homeschooling allows you to depart from the "bottle" model of school learning and follow a different concept of how children learn.

My friend, the late John Holt, wrote about how people learn throughout his ten books about education. He spent the better part of his life demonstrating that we can trust children to learn all the time. John observed that for children under school age, living and learning are interconnected, but once they enter school, the two are separated. Learning is supposed to take place in special buildings called schools, and living takes place outside of school. But from the moment children are born they learn from everything they have access to, not just from special teachers and places. Children learn to walk and talk with little or no formal teaching from us parents. Several studies have noted that homeschooled children consistently test at or above grade level when compared to their schooled age-mates, regardless of the degrees attained or teacher certification of their parents. Washington, Alaska, and Alabama are three states that have studied and reported this. This proves not only that we can trust our children to learn, but that we can trust ourselves to be effective teachers for our children.

"But I'm not good at math," you may be thinking. "How could I be a good homeschooling parent?" First, homeschoolers use a wide variety of resources and learning materials. Some feel more comfortable beginning with a fairly traditional curriculum, and many different ones are readily available. Other families follow a less conventional approach, learning according to their own time tables and taking advantage of individual learning. Many parents find homeschooling greatly stimulates their own thinking and creativity and provides them with new learning opportunities.

Homeschoolers also think very hard about friends, relations, neighbors, and co-workers who have expertise in areas their children want to explore. We hear many stories about how non-family members offer considerable help with a child's home education. One child decided she wanted to learn more math than her mother was familiar with. Her mother found a math tutor for her. Another story is about how a boy learned a great deal about computer programming from adults he met at his church and through Scouts. Amber Clifford, a sixteen-year-old homeschooler from Missouri, wrote to us about her interest in archaeology, something her parents know nothing about. "I was able to do the reading and studying on my own, but my parents helped me find the resource people that I needed and took me to the places that I needed to see. We're in a town with a university, so when I was interested in fossils, my mother called the geology department and got the professor to talk to me. I didn't know how to go about finding someone, and she did, so this is where she was really helpful to me."

Some of you may feel that the children I am describing are special, that homeschoolers are taking the best and most motivated children out of school and leaving school with the dregs. The fact is that many of the children now flourishing in homeschools were not flourishing in school. Some parents began homeschooling children who had been labeled "learning disabled" in school, and they watched their children lose their LD behavior. Other homeschoolers have children for whom school was not challenging enough, and they teach them at home using materials and experiences that match their needs. Some homeschooled children are late readers, not learning to read until they are ten or so. Grant Colfax, a homeschooled. child who graduated from Harvard and is now in medical school, didn't learn to read until he was nine. Woodrow Wilson, who was homeschooled, learned to read when he was eleven. Children like Colfax and Wilson develop other talents and skills while they are young, and when they do learn to read they do so without special difficulty. In school these late readers would be immediately segregated and treated for these academic deficiencies, and they would be held back from other learning opportunities until they could read at their grade level. It is simply not true that all homeschoolers would be winners in school anyway.

Despite the diversity of methods and reasons for homeschooling, there is one thing each and every homeschooler has in common: they all asked, "How will your children be socialized if they don't go to school?"

Homeschooling allows children to participate and learn in the real world. It allows them to mix with much younger and much older people, take courses as they want or need them, and apprentice with people they can learn from in the community. Homeschoolers play with their friends in their neighborhood and make friends with other homeschoolers. A young homeschooler in Pennsylvania wrote to us about their experience volunteering at a home for disabled kids; a family from California wrote to us about their son's work in a soup kitchen. Many families write to us about how their children participate in community theater, give music lessons to younger children in their neighborhood, share hobbies with fellow enthusiasts of all ages. Homeschoolers have apprenticed at historical societies, veterinarian's offices, architecture firms, nature centers, and many other places. Serena Gingold, a homeschooled youngster from California, wrote to us about her involvement in local politics: "I've written letters to the editor about my opinions. You really learn a lot about opinions when you publicly voice your own. I've also been publicly criticized, and my county fair projects were censored because they were 'too political' (actually because I was too political for a kid). One letter in the paper criticized me for being a kid and having opinions! People always say I should go to school so I learn about the real world, but I'm living in the real world!"

Certainly group experiences are a big part of education, and homeschoolers have plenty of them. Homeschoolers write to us about how they form or join writing clubs, book discussion groups, and local homeschooling support groups. Homeschoolers also take part in school sports teams and music groups, as well as the many public and private group activities our communities provide. For example, Kristin Williams of Michigan recently wrote to our magazine, Growing Without Schooling, about how they meet many different types of people. "We're a black family living in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood," she writes. "...We don't really go out looking for people who are different from ourselves. Many come through the family: a cousin has an Arab-American girlfriend, another had a Japanese mother-in-law, another is married to an Afro-Canadian, one to a Polish- American, still another to a Jamaican and one to a Nigerian." She writes how through church, 4-H club, and neighbors they have encountered and enjoyed many different types of people. At home they play tapes of foreign music, listen to overseas shortwave radio broadcasts, cook ethnic foods, go to international fairs and multi-cultural worship services. Homeschoolers can and do experience other people and cultures without going to school.

The flipside of socialization is solitary reflection. Homeschooling allows children to have some time alone, time to pursue their own thoughts and interests. Children, like adults, need time to be alone to think, to muse, to read freely, to daydream, to be creative, to form a self independent of the barrage of mass culture. A British man once remarked to me how amazing it was to him that Americans expect schools to socialize their children. "I always thought the social graces were taught at home," he said. This observation is supported by a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This study tracked how childhood experiences - in and out of school - affected adult development over a 36-year period. The study concluded that the only factor that showed a significant effect by itself on children's social maturity and their later social accomplishment as adults was "parental warmth and affection."

You may find that you teach your children at home for just a semester, for a year, or forever. The choice is yours, not school's. The entry or reentry of homeschooled children into the classroom appears to be no different than for those who transfer into a school from another district.

Homeschooling works because schooling is not the same thing as education. School is not the only place to learn, to grow up. Universities and colleges recognize this fact whenever they admit homeschoolers who have never attended school. Homeschoolers who never attended, or rarely attended, any schools are currently students at Harvard, Boston University, Rice University, and the Curtis Institute of Music, to name a few. In addition, homeschoolers who decide not to go to college are finding adult work without special difficulty. Some of the homeschoolers I know who fall into this category are currently employed in the fields of computers, ballet, theater, movies, aviation, construction, and overseas missionary work.

Consider these famous people who were homeschooled for some or all of their school years: Authors William Blake, Charles Dickens, Pearl Buck, Agatha Christie and Margaret Atwood; social and political figures Benjamin Franklin, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Samuel Gompers, Charles Lindberg, Florence Nightingale; artists Andrew Wyeth, Yehudi Menuhin, Sean O'Casey, Charlie Chaplin, Claude Monet, and Noel Coward; inventors Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. One of the world's richest men, the man for whom this hall is named, Andrew Carnegie, was homeschooled until he was nine. He was coaxed into attending school after that, but by the age of thirteen Carnegie left school and never went back. School attendance is not the only way to become a successful, sociable adult.

Vita Wallace, a homeschooler from Pennsylvania, wrote these words when she turned sixteen and officially graduated from homeschooling: "The most important thing I think I have gained through my education is that I know what I love to do. I think if I had gone to school I wouldn't have had time to find out. I know it's awfully confusing for people when, after graduating from thirteen years of schooling, they still don't know. I've been able to make friends with all kinds of different people - people younger, the same age, and older than I am; my teachers, colleagues and students; my neighbors young and old; my parents' friends, my brother's friends and teachers; and most important, my brother. He's been my best friend all along, and I am so glad we didn't go to school if only for the one reason that we might not have been able to be such bosom buddies otherwise..."

Homeschooling is not a panacea to all our educational problems, but it is part of the answer. It is a proven option for any of you who wish to try it.

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Can a Christian Be an Unschooler?

This article originally appeared in Growing Without Schooling, Issue 106, Aug/Sept 1995, p. 34. 

Once in my travels across the country I was at dinner with some homeschoolers and one of them remarked to me, "You know, John Holt was right. I don't know of anyone who homeschools more than two or three years without throwing their curriculum out the window and developing their own by following their kids' interests. What we need is a Christian John Holt."

I thought to myself at the time, "What's so awful about the real John Holt? Why must John's rich and flexible ideas about education be claimed by someone else before they will be heard?" These questions re-emerged for me after I read an interesting article written by Mary Hood titled "Can a Christian be an Unschooler?" She frames many of the issues surrounding this question which I want to address.

Mary Hood feels that John Holt's ideas are rooted in the work of Rousseau; I respectfully disagree. In nearly all of John's work he emphasizes that the root of his ideas about learning is his direct observations of children and his own learning experiences. This, plus lack of training as a professional teacher, form the basis for his deep trust and understanding of parents and children and of the possibilities for learning outside of school. The most that I think can be said is that Holt's conclusions on certain issues were similar to Rousseau's, but to claim that Holt's ideas are rooted in Rousseau's establishes an unfair bias against Holt for many readers, since it is immediately noted that the ideas of Rousseau are not Biblical in origin. In any case, again, it would be simply inaccurate to think that Holt himself felt that his work grew out of Rousseau's.

Hood goes on to contrast Calvin's idea about harshly disciplining children to force them down the right path with Rousseau's idea that natural man was born good and was deabsed by contact with the outside world. She then posits John Holt squarely on the side of Rousseau. Frankly, I find nothing in John Holt's writing to support this claim.

John never wrote that children are naturally good. However, he did often write that they are natural learners (Learning All the Time, p. 159, for example). In How Children Learn he wrote, "What I am trying to say about education rests on a belief that, though there is much evidence to support it, I cannot prove, and that may never be proved. Call it faith. This faith is that man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns." To the criticism that all Holt advocated was leaving children alone, let me give a full quote to assure the context of this often misunderstood idea:

    Life is full of ironies. I wrote How Children Learn hoping to help introduce the natural, effortless, and effective ways of learning of the happy home into the schools. At times I fear I may only have helped to bring the strained, self-conscious, painful, and ineffective ways of learning of the schools into the home. To parents I say, above all else, don't let your home become some terrible miniature copy of the school. No lesson plans! No quizzes! No tests! No report cards! Even leaving your children alone would be better; at least they could figure out some things on their own. Live together, as well as you can; enjoy life together, as much as you can [My emphasis -- PF] Ask questions to find out something about the world itself, not to find out whether or not someone knows it.

    (Teach Your Own, p. 229)

John is saying leave children alone rather than give them unasked-for teaching. He is not advocating ignoring children as an educational precept. Parents and other concerned people are certainly part of the equation of unschooling: Live together... enjoy life together...

Nowhere in John's 10 books do I recall seeing any philosophical statement that children are naturally good and would grow up better if they had no contact with the outside world. In fact, John wrote often and passionately about how adults can help children learn by participating with other people, young and old, in activities in the real world. John also had his eyes open to the fact that people can be willfully bad: "Human society has never until now had to come to grips with the source of human evildoing, which is the wish to do evil..." (John was referring to the dropping of napalm and white phosphorous on men, women, and children in peasant villages in Vietnam. The Underachieving School, p. 117). Finally, John did advise people in his talks and writing to try as much as possible, to think and expect the best of children and to give them second chances, indeed as many chances as you can; is this not scriptural?

Using a spectrum from Rousseau to Calvin, Hood locates Holt right next to Rousseau; then she writes that she actually feels more comfortable with someone in the middle, Charlotte Mason. However, I think from my reading of Holt that he is far more in tune with Charlotte Mason's ideas about good and evil than he is with Rousseau's! Mary describes Mason's position this way: that children were born neither good nor bad, but with tendencies towards both, and that our role as adults was to provide gentle guidance to those in our care.

According to Mary Hood's article, what differentiates a relaxed Christian homeschooler from an unschooler is that:

    ...inside, where it counts, I have an underlying structure, clearly defined goals, and a firm Christian value system. We have a Christian family structure in our household, and our kids know that there are limits to their behavior. They don't run around flipping the TV on whenever they want to, and they don't call us by our first names... ...So can a Christian be an unschooler? I guess the answer is yes and no. I prefer the term relaxed. You can't be an unschooler and a Christian if that means you think the children are going to be perfect little flowers. You can't treat the family as if it was a total democracy if you believe in the Christian family structure. You can't let discipline go down the drain in the name of respecting children...

The unfortunate stereotype of unschoolers being unstructured, undisciplined, and doormats to their children is strongly implied here, and like all stereotypes is wrong and unfair. Further, the term unschooling means many things now that it didn't mean when John coined the word to describe learning without going to school. When pressed for a definition of unschooling, I now reply "Allowing children as much freedom to explore the world as you can comfortably bear as their parent." However, for John Holt unschooling was simply a better word than homeschooling. If you look up "unschooling" in the index of Teach Your Own it says "See homeschooling."

More to the point, though, unschooling is an educational approach, an attitude towards learning. It refers to the ways in which we use books, materials, and experiences to learn and grow. The type of underlying structure you have inside yourself, your goals, value system, discipline, whether you watch TV or call parents by their first names, whether you use a patriarchal, democratic, or any other type of family structure, are not unschooling issues; they are parenting issues. Whether unschoolers or not, every parent must deal with these issues.

John Holt certainly offered advice about discipline and other parenting issues—sibling rivalry, kids testing the limits of their parents, and so on. Since homeschooling, no matter how it's done, does involve questions of how to live happily with one's children, it makes sense that John discussed these questions and that our readers often discuss them now. Indeed, I know of no homeschooling publication that can talk about teaching children at home without bringing up parenting issues at some point. The two are indeed related. But that doesn't mean that they are always identical, or that practicing a certain homeschooling style—for example, not using a packaged curriculum -- necessarily means taking a certain position on family and parenting issues.

I want to end by noting that I agree with nearly all of what Mary Hood writes about children and learning. I respect that she learns from Holt's work and can take what she needs from it, leave what she doesn't like, and build from there. I just want to correct common misconceptions some Christians hold about Holt's work. Where Mary Hood and I differ is on matters of personal faith and parenting, which are very important matters but also very private and personal matters. Homeschoolers can agree on matters of how children learn and can even share a similar homeschooling style without agreeing on all of those personal issues; Christians can be unschoolers.

Mary Hood's book is The Relaxed Home School.

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John Holt

By Roland Meighan, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007. Volume 5 in The Continuum Library of Educational Thought. Series editor: Richard Bailey

Foreword by Patrick Farenga

John Holt is a rare writer about education because he brought about changes not only in schools, but also in our homes. Holt was a major influence on the school reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and then, when he decided most people did not want schools to change in the progressive, learner-centered ways he advocated, he became a major influence on the modern homeschooling movement. Equally remarkable for someone working in the field of education, Holt wrote all his books in a deliberately accessible style for the general public and he did this as an independent researcher, without affiliation to, or the support of, any university or public or private institution. When How Children Fail became a national best-seller in 1964, Holt was encouraged by a friend to enter the world of academia instead of becoming an independent critic. Holt responded, in a letter quoted in A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (Ohio State Univ. Press, 1992):

I am trying to find out why the capacity of so many children for perceiving, and learning, and thinking, declines so rapidly as they grow older, and what we could do to prevent this from happening … I am very firmly convinced that a university tie would hinder my work far more than it would help it … I can think of a number of projects that I have carried out in past years, in my own classes or with individual children. From these I have learned a great deal. None of them would have been considered a research project as a university ordinarily understands the word. … I explore the intelligence of children by creating situations and then seeing how they respond to them and what they make of them. I am truly exploring, and an explorer does not know, when he starts into a bit of unknown country, what he is going to find there. But this is not how most of what passes for educational research is done, or how research proposals are written up…… For the time being, it seems a matter [working for a university—PF] of spending a large part of my time doing things their way in the hope that they will allow me to spend some of my time doing things my way. I can’t see it; life is too short, and I believe that I can learn far more and even have more influence working as I am.

Holt’s clear-headed vision about his work in this letter show an almost prescient knowledge of his later transformations of thought and opinion as a public intellectual, education writer, school reformer, political activist, and a founder of the homeschooling movement. His independence of thought and descriptions about not just the techniques, but the emotions attached to teaching and learning continue to surprise readers, as well as to influence parents to homeschool their chiildren. His books have now been translated into over 20 languages, and they continue to generate adherents and controversy.

For instance, Holt’s vision of homeschooling, or “unschooling” as he preferred to call it in the early years of the movement, was not about doing school at home with one’s siblings and parents. Instead, it was about learning in and outside the home, in places and with people that do not resemble school at all. Holt viewed learning as an abundant, natural, human endeavor that gets warped or turned-off by imposing years of unasked-for teaching upon the learner. He envisioned not just families, but entire communities becoming places for life-long learning. Indeed, Holt’s writing continues to inspire people to create co-operative learning centers, and develop other forms of community-based activities for children and adults, defying the charge leveled against homeschoolers that they are only interested in their own children and circumstances. However, to use a current analogy from the world of high technology, most educators refuse to acknowledge Holt’s “open source” approach to education and insist on their “proprietary” approach to making children learn what they think they need to know month-by-month, year-by-year. Often, it seems that these rival visions of education are irreconcilable. Fortunately, Roland Meighan has written this wonderful exposition of John Holt’s work that provides us with a sensitive understanding of how these visions of education can, indeed, be reconciled.

Meighan summarizes Holt’s work in clear prose that Holt himself would have enjoyed, and Meighan puts Holt’s work in the context of our current times. Most professional educators and politicians dismiss Holt’s work as “romantic” and impractical because of the radical changes it could make to compulsory schooling.  However, as Meighan points out, Holt’s ideas about teaching and learning are important and practical and they continue to be implemented and adapted by a variety of homeschooling parents and independent alternative schools. Read this book not only to learn about John Holt’s work, but about what you can do in your own life to personalize and make education meaningful not just to yourself, but for others as well. In this age of regressive, formulaic compulsory schooling, Roland Meighan’s book shows us how Holt’s work is truly radical, that is, it goes back to the root of education, and how people outside the school system can influence and change education in ways that reformers inside the school system can not.

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Foreword to John Holt's The Underachieving School

For readers of a certain age all I have to do is write, “The United States of America, 1969” and all sorts of images, sounds, and thoughts enter their minds. For those unfamiliar with the period known as “The Sixties” there are more than enough histories and memoirs to become familiar with it and all will help you grasp the feeling of impending radical change, coupled with frustration with the pace of change, that is present in the essays in this book.

John Holt had a particular place in the uproar of the sixties: he was among the foremost advocates for free schools, student rights, and education reform. His previous books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn catapulted him from his job as a fifth-grade private school teacher to a national speaker and consultant about how to improve schools. He was “in demand” as a public speaker and appeared on national media to talk about his ideas and how our schools could be changed into better places for children to learn in. While travelling around the country Holt visited hundreds of schools, speaking to both faculty and students about their experiences, noting and thinking about what he was learning.

Towards the end of The Underachieving School Holt notes how he would be a visiting lecturer in education at Harvard University and at the University of California – Berkeley in the next year. Holt was also an outspoken critic of the Vietnam war and an enthusiastic supporter of student organizations. It seems that he was so busy speaking, observing, and organizing during this period that he didn’t have the time write a new book. However, his writing was very much in demand and appeared in some of the most popular publications of the sixties, as well as in radical publications that Holt wanted to help gain more readers. The best of these articles were chosen by Holt for this book. The variety of places Holt’s voice was heard in the sixties is impressive: Redbook, The New York Review of Books, Life Magazine, The NY Times Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Book Week, The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Broadside 2. The essays cover an incredible range of issues and, in a few instances, foreshadow where Holt’s thoughts would take him in the seventies when he became one of the most famous advocates for homeschooling.

John was at the top of his profession, so to speak, during the late sixties. His first two books were bestsellers and his services were in demand: Library Journal reviewed The Underachieving School and proclaimed, “This book may stir up almost as much debate as John Dewey’s Democracy and Education.”  The issues Holt wrote about then are still hot topics today and there is a “the more things change the more they stay the same” feeling that comes over you as you read this book. I think it is difficult to improve on any of Holt’s critiques of testing, compulsory schooling, prestige colleges, extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations for learning, the rat race, racism, poverty, teacher education in these brief, stinging essays. For instance:

"…Here and there are schools that have been turned, against their will, into high-pressure learning factories by the demands of parents. But in large part, educators themselves are the source and cause of these pressures. Increasingly, instead of developing the intellect, character, and potential of the students in their care, they are using them for their own purposes in a contest inspired by vanity and aimed at winning money and prestige. It is only in theory, today, that educational institutions serve the student; in fact, the real job of a student at any ambitious institution is, by his performance, to enhance the reputation of that institution…
…The pressures we put on our young people also tend to destroy their sense of power and purpose. A friend of mine, who recently graduated with honors from a prestige college, said that he and other students there were given so much to read that, even if you were an exceptionally good read and spent all your time studying, you could not do as much as half of it.Looking at work that can never be done, young people tend to feel, like many a tired businessman, that life if a rat race. They do not feel in control of their own lives. Outside forces hurry them along with no pause for breath of thought, for purposes not their own, to an unknown end. Society does not seem to them a community that they are preparing to join and shape like the city of an ancient Greek; it is more like a remote and impersonal machine that will one day bend them to its will."

Holt had an ability to present his analyses with striking candor and reason. The essay “Making Children Hate Reading,” has been reprinted many times since it first appeared. And “Teachers Talk Too Much,” which originally appeared in The PTA Magazine, has just as much relevance today:

… Most discussions [in classrooms] are pretty phony, anyway. Look through any teacher’s manual. Before long you will read something like this: “Have a discussion in which you bring out the following points…” Most teachers begin a discussion with “points” in mind that they want the students to say. The students know this, so they fish for clues to find out what is wanted …
… The teacher’s questions get more and more pointed, until they point straight to the answer. When the teacher finally gets the answer he was after, he talks some more, to make sure all the students understand it is the “right” answer and why it is …

Holt’s optimism about how schools would change appears in these essays, but what is also evident is his openness to new ideas. Unlike most school reformers, who feel we must only work to change the school system from within, Holt was thinking about other possibilities in case that didn’t work. One can see the outline of his support for alternatives to school for children, not just for the alternative schools he enthuses about in The Underachieving School. I was most struck by the passages that show him considering keeping children out of school altogether. In “Not So Golden Rule Days” Holt claims how compulsory attendance laws are outdated and suggests that

… if in the opinion of a child and his parents the school is doing him no good, or indeed doing him harm, he should not be required to attend any more frequently than he wishes. There should be no burden of proof on the parents to show that they can provide facilities, companionship with other children, and all the other things the schools happen to provide. If Billy Smith hates school, and his parents feel that he is right in hating it, they are constitutionally entitled to relief. They are not obliged to demonstrate that they can give him a perfect education as against the bad one the school is giving him. It is a fundamental legal principle that if we can show that a wrong is being done, we are not compelled to say what ought to be done in its place before we are permitted to insist that it be stopped.

Indeed many of the arguments Holt made then are continuing to be made by school reformers today. Today’s arguments are backed by even more research and data than Holt cited in 1968, yet these voices are still not taken seriously by school authorities. We now have more tests than ever for American school children, our child suicide rate is the highest in the developed world, drug and alcohol abuse among our youth is a major problem, disaffected youths have directed their violence at schools at ever younger ages, yet we act as though these problems would all go away if only our students got better instruction and grades in reading, writing, and arithmetic. John Holt realized that school and society, living and learning, are all of a piece and he wanted to reunite them.

Ron Miller, in his book Free Schools, Free People: Education and Democracy After the 1960s, writes, “Although this outburst of protest and dissent failed to bring about the “revolution” that many envisioned, it left a complex legacy of cultural change that continues, to this day, to pose radical alternatives to the dominant economic, political, and social forces of the modern world.”

Holt’s response to the demise of the revolution was not to run away, but rather to run towards what he was envisioning for education.  “Back to Basics” became the rallying cry for schools in the seventies and eighties and Holt decided that school reform failed because most people simply did not support the reforms they were proposing. Holt realized most people did not want schools to change in any meaningful way and he began to seek other avenues to help remove obstacles to children and “any gainful or useful contribution he wants to make to society.” He became an outspoken advocate for children’s rights and he sought, and found, other models for education besides conventional schooling. This search culminated in his book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better (1976; reprinted 2004), which, in turn, led directly to Holt’s full support of the homeschooling movement in 1977. 

Teenage Homeschoolers: College or Not?

The Foundations of Unschooling

This is a revised version of my keynote speech to the Irish Unschooling Conference, May 2016. Please provide proper credit for my work if you use or share the information presented here.—Patrick Farenga

I’ve been involved in unschooling since 1981, when I joined John Holt, and I published the magazine he founded, Growing Without Schooling, from his death in 1985 until 2001, when it ceased publication. We unschooled our girls, who are now ages 23, 27, and 30. I was asked to talk about the foundation and research that supports unschooling, so I need to start with that unusual word, unschooling.

Many of you are at this event because you are already familiar with the term, but for those of you who aren’t, unschooling is a term first coined by the John Holt to mean learning and teaching that does not resemble school learning and teaching. I broadly define unschooling as allowing your children as much freedom to explore the world around them in their own ways as you can comfortably bear; I see unschooling in the light of partnership, not in the light of the dominance of a child’s wishes over a parents’ or vice versa.

The freedom for anyone, young or old, to choose why, what, when, how, and from whom to learn things is a key element in John Holt’s work. In short, if you don’t have the freedom to choose what to think about then you are in mental slavery; of course, we can choose to subordinate ourselves to a teacher (the master–pupil relationship) in order to accomplish or learn something, but that relationship only works well if the student wants to learn that subject or work with that teacher.

Further, Holt said louder and more often than most educators then and now that children are far better at learning than we give them credit for. After years of being a conventional schoolteacher, a hard grader, a professional who worked in exclusive private schools, John Holt developed a philosophy of education based on his personal observations, reading, experiences, and conversations with children, as well with adults who did not use grades, bribes, threats, punishment, or other forms of control to make children learn. He put these thoughts into action in his classrooms—he was fired more than once to due his “noisy” classrooms and minimalist attitude towards grading. He eventually got his ideas into print, and there John Holt hit a nerve and became, without a teaching credential or graduate degree, a public intellectual and bestselling author. His books have been translated into over 41 languages and his first two books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn have sold over 1 and half million copies. Eight of his ten books are still currently in print, 31 years after his death.

What John observed and thought about over his years of teaching was this: I teach, but the students don’t learn. Why? I urge you to read How Children Fail and How Children Learn to get the full story, but here it is in short: John worked in high-powered private schools and he decided that it was fear of failure, fear of appearing stupid, fear of criticism from children and adults, the overall fear many feel in school that inhibits learning and leads children and adults to create what John called the charade of learning in school.

Namely, the students pass a test on Friday, but the material is forgotten by the students by Monday. Nonetheless, grades have been entered in the official records, seat time noted, and time clocks punched and therefore learning has happened as far as school is concerned. Holt wanted more than this for children and adults in the schools he worked in. At the same time he was thinking about the charade of learning in school, John was spending a lot of time with his sisters’ young children, as well as other preschool-age children, and he kept noting how easily, joyfully, seriously, and unselfconsciously young children learn to do all sorts of things without formally being instructed. Walking, talking, socializing, counting, reading, writing—all are learned by young children, often just with help when they ask or show signs for it. John wondered, “Why can’t adults let children continue to learn in this same successful manner as they get older?” Why, indeed?

John Holt observed the differences between the free and easy learning of preschool-age children and the controlled and difficult learning of children in school in How Children Learn in 1967 (by the way, the book is still in print and celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2017). He also noted in the pages of Growing Without Schooling magazine and elsewhere that children are young scientists exploring the world: “The process by which children turn experience into knowledge is exactly the same, point for point, as the process by which those whom we call scientists make scientific knowledge.” (Learning All the Time, 1989).

This statement is given more credence by research since Holt first noted this in the 1960s. In 2000 Prof. Alison Gopnick co-authored the book The Scientist In The Crib, and in 2010 she wrote The Philosophical Baby, which continues to make a strong argument in this vein. In 2013 she published an article titled "We All Start Out As Scientists, But Some of Us Forget: Why babies are so much better than adults at learning new things.” Children are much better at learning than parenting and education experts have led us to believe. (Gopnick's latest book digs further into the parenting angle and encourages parents to stop parenting so intensively.)

You might be wondering at this point, "This is fine for wealthy families, for professors who can raise their children comfortably, but what about working class people? I'm not smart enough to help my children learn and I don't have the time to devote to them to take them to classes or tutors."

The good news is, anyone can help their children learn and grow and humans have been doing this since they first appeared on earth. It is only since the mid-nineteenth century that universal compulsory school advocates succeeded in segregating children from the real world and made children learn in special classrooms from special people who control, predict, reward, and punish them for doing what the curriculum demands.

One excellent study in Great Britain, published as Young Children Learning, examined how young children learn by comparing the conversations of children in their preschool settings to the conversations they had with their parents at home. The researchers got permission to hide microphones and record the conversations in the schools and homes for these children and after studying hours of these talks they determined that regardless of the parents' education level, the conversations at home were deeper and richer than the conversations at school. In fact, they noted that in school it was often the teacher who needed to initiate the conversations but at home it was the children. And at home the children would ask very large questions—"Who is God?", "Why is the sky blue?"—but at school they tended to be cautious about asking about things that weren't prompted by the teacher.

So it's not a matter of being smart and well-trained in pedagogical techniques that helps children learn, but a matter of being open, welcoming, and truly conversational with them—not a quiz or psychological probe disguised as a conversation. John Holt summed it up well:  "It can't be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one—when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own." (How Children Learn, p. 124)

Anyone can help their children learn; you don't need a teaching certificate in any state in America in order to homeschool, nor must you use books and materials created just for schools to use—yet homeschoolers get into school or college or find work worth doing when they need to.  This is because the school model for learning is just one way, and a very recent way in terms of how long humans have learned without such intensive, factory-like learning. It is more a matter of being kind and attentive to children's questions, helping them find the people, classes, books, experiences, or materials that might further their interest in those questions instead of pushing them through the school factory.

One last comment about helping children learn: Dr. Raymond Moore, an early and influential proponent for homeschooling, liked to say that he could always tell when there was a good learning environment in a home by who is asking the questions—if it's the children, then it is good!

John was familiar with schools that had various programs, vocational, work-study, travel abroad, gap year, these sorts of escape valves for kids who didn’t fit into the standard school mold. But that was thin gruel for children in Holt's mind. He knew that children weren’t born blank slates to be programmed by adults (which was the dominant belief, in the 1950s and 1960s, about children’s cognition) because he saw how children were learning all the time but in their own ways and time frames, and that children, like adults, don’t like to be constantly prodded, controlled, and guilt-tripped into doing something they would rather not do. So after about ten years as a popular school reformer John Holt started to question if reforming school was really a worthwhile activity if the goal was to create agency for students, to create enough time and space for self-directed education to occur.

School is not designed to support self-directed education—it is not in its origins, its DNA. School was originally founded as a way to control the unruly poor in ancient Greece and continues to serve this function in our present-day institutions. Plato makes clear in The Republic and elsewhere that schools are for the elite of society to discuss and plan how to best utilize the resources of the empire. The commoners, free slaves, women, and foreigners were not allowed to participate in the ancient Greek skole (school); they were just resources to be best utilized by their betters. Ivan Illich noted how this stain of slavery continues to be unacknowledged in schools throughout the world today.

Holt, thousands of years after Plato, wrote in 1978 about Prof. David Nasaw’s book Schooled To Order (Oxford Univ. Press.):

I learned also from this book that when the Irish first came to this country they made very strenuous efforts, despite their own poverty, to provide education for their children in accordance with their own beliefs. These efforts were in time destroyed by the movement for tax-supported government schools. This had generally been true of American poor and working-class people. They understood all too well that a chief purpose of government schools was to kill the independence and ambition of their children. They wanted their children to believe that they were as good as, and had the same rights as, anyone else, a very subversive and dangerous idea. But they could not long support their own schools and the government schools as well, and these independent ventures died out.

Mr. Nasaw gives us one quote that is almost too good (or bad) to be true. In 1908 James Russell, Dean of Teacher’s College of Columbia University, said to a symposium of the National Education Association:

“How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which in the nature of events cannot possibly be fulfilled? If the chief object of government be to promote civil order and social stability (Ed. note—not quite what the Declaration of Independence says), how can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders? Is human nature so constituted that those who fail will readily acquiesce in the success of their rivals? . . . Is it any wonder that we are beset with labor troubles?

In this same vein James Callaghan, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, said not long ago in a major speech on education that what Britain needed was “round pegs for round holes.”

Holt felt that modern-day education was at heart a faulty enterprise and that better solutions than giving children more and more schooling were before our eyes. “It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life,” wrote John, “"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go.”

Once we grasp that we learn all the time—even while sleeping our dreams can reveal or internalize new learning for us—we can develop new models and places for children and adults to learn and share their knowledge. Let me provide some examples first from John’s personal efforts, and then into a larger scheme of things.

Once he decided school reform was not going to improve the lives of children John initially thought the solution was to give children the same rights of citizenship that adults have. The book he wrote about that idea, Escape From Childhood, caused many of his former colleagues in the school reform movement to question his thinking since it contains a lot about how children should control their own learning and have as much access to the world as they could handle, including the right to refuse to attend school and the right to travel.

I reprinted Escape From Childhood a couple of years ago and it still causes people’s heads to explode when they consider letting children have the same rights as citizens. But the push back Holt endured on this topic made him realize he was touching a sensitive nerve for most adults. In his next book, Freedom and Beyond, John considered free and alternative schools and he concluded that no matter the good intentions a school has, conventional schooling (what Holt termed “hard jails”) and alternative schooling (what he termed “soft jails”) were not going to raise significant numbers of people out of poverty or improve children’s attitudes about learning.

The solution is to try to use our resources to directly lessen poverty and see if that change improves educational attainment, rather than imagine that processing children through school even more intensively will reduce poverty. Based on all the studies at the time Holt was writing (1974), and what we know today about how educational attainment is directly correlated to income and social standing (zip code) far more than it is to any particular school, method, or educational plan, why do we insist on giving poor children more academics, less play time, and tell their parents they must enforce these school rules in their homes? Despite Holt's and others’ critiques of education’s ability to reduce poverty, schools continued to successfully push themselves as the main way for people to rise out of poverty.

Holt continued to think about how to improve the lives of children and learners of all ages in his next book called Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better. In it John describes a wide variety of places where adults and children choose to learn—foreign language schools, cooking classes, martial art dojos, music lessons, sports teams, hobby associations. He also describes how quiet, solitude, and self-reflection are vital components of living that children, actually all of us, need time to explore and develop on our own.

This book, written in 1976, ends with a call to create an underground railroad to help children leave schools and learn in and from the world and people around them. Soon after this book was published people wrote to Holt telling him an underground railroad wasn’t necessary because you could remove your child from school and teach them yourself. Some parents were doing it openly, but most were not open about homeschooling at that time. But there were enough families from around the United States, and eventually from around the world, who contacted John with their stories that he decided they should know about one another and that he wanted to help them grow in number. Holt created the first issue of Growing Without Schooling magazine and published it in August 1977, giving the modern homeschooling movement its first, consistent, public voice.

As John corresponded with these early homeschoolers, he started to put together a picture of how children learned before school became their primary place to live and learn. Holt collected and shared fiction and nonfiction stories about childhood in the days before school was compulsory, in order to remind us how children and adults once mixed more freely and how well children learned without constant management by adults. He wrote about Margaret Mead and others’ work with native people and how they lived with their children; John was deeply impressed by the work of the self-taught anthropologist Jean Liedloff, the author of the Continuum Concept. John was impressed not only with her descriptions of how the Yeqana Indians cared for their children, but also with how children were allowed to play undisturbed while the adults did their things throughout the day, but also, if they wished, the children could observe the adult activities, often on the periphery, and participate if possible. Liedloff notes the absence of any formal teaching and how conversation, observation, and mimicking adult behavior leads to tribal children’s intellectual development. Hunting and gathering expeditions, sharp knives and tools, tribal councils and rituals were all accessible to the young.

Carol Black is a filmmaker and writer whose latest essay, “On the Wildness of Children” eloquently states recent research that supports Liedloff’s observations.

In many rural land-based societies, learning is not coerced; children are expected to voluntarily observe, absorb, practice, and master the knowledge and skills they will need as adults –– and they do. In these societies –– which exist on every inhabited continent –– even very young children are free to choose their own actions, to play, to explore, to participate, to take on meaningful responsibility. “Learning” is not conceived as a special activity at all, but as a natural by-product of being alive in the world.

Researchers are finding that children in these settings spend most of their time in a completely different attentional state from children in modern schools, a state psychology researcher Suzanne Gaskins calls "open attention." Open attention is widely focused, relaxed, alert; Gaskins suggests it may have much in common with the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” If something moves in the broad field of perception, the child will notice it. If something interesting happens, he can watch for hours. A child in this state seems to absorb her culture by osmosis, by imperceptible degrees picking up what the adults talk about, what they do, how they think, what they know.

We don’t live in a primitive society, goes the counterargument, so our children must learn in modern-day society. This objection doesn’t address the issue though, because the problem is that we don’t allow our children to live and learn in modern-day society much at all, they must live and learn under the fluorescent lights and assumptions of school, in segmented areas with texts, songs, teachers, and information made just for children, and for longer periods of their lives. Children must learn to focus on what the school wants them to focus on, so open attention becomes a deficit in these school environments. Here’s another quote from Carol Black’s essay, “On the Wildness of Children.”

Inuit author Mini Aodla Freeman recounts how, when she first came South from the Arctic, the thing that surprised her most was the children:

“They were not allowed to be normal the way children in my culture are allowed: free to move, free to ask questions, free to think aloud, and most of all, free to make comments so that they will get wiser… To my people, such discipline can prevent a child from growing mentally, killing the child’s sense of interest.”

If you thwart a child’s will too much when he is young, says Aodla Freeman, he will become uncooperative and rebellious later (sound familiar?). You find this view all over the world, in many parts of the Americas, in parts of Africa, India, Asia, Papua New Guinea. It was, of course, a great source of frustration to early missionaries in the Americas, who were stymied in their efforts to educate Indigenous children by parents who would not allow them to be beaten: “The Savages,” Jesuit missionary Paul le Jeune complained in 1633, “cannot chastise a child, nor see one chastised. How much trouble this will give us in carrying out our plans of teaching the young!”

What would happen if we allowed children to learn and share the world with adults more than we do now? Can a person’s open attention develop into useful skills and employment? The pages of Growing Without Schooling magazine and the strong growth of the homeschooling movement around the world show an incredible array of living and learning situations created by families, including taking children to work, reclaiming the home as a center of productivity as well as leisure, and creating clubs and associations based on the interests and activities of the members regardless of their age. Further, school is also part of the equation, but it is not the lead player. It is a resource to be used as wanted or needed, rather than a compulsory chore. Our own daughters moved in and out of public schools as they tried different classes and wanted to make new friends, but they were always free to leave school, which they did.

Holt never felt the word “homeschooling” was adequate to describe the learning he was talking about—learning that didn’t need to take place at home nor look like school learning. John knew that many children want to be out in the world, to be in the community and learn the lay of the neighborhood because, like most healthy humans, they are social beings—it is in our nature to be social, curious, and to learn. So John used the word “unschooling” to describe this type of learning—after already trying out the word “deschooling,” coined by John’s friend Ivan Illich, and found to be too harsh by the public. Unschooling didn’t fare any better and John himself, by 1981, was using the word homeschooling interchangeably with unschooling.

But John Holt never gave up on the concepts embedded in the term unschooling. Unschooling has a long and distinguished pedigree though you’d never guess that today, where everyone is worried that if they don’t have money to pay tuition, either their own money or the government’s, they won’t learn anything worth knowing and will be condemned to menial jobs for a living. Fortunately that’s just an old wive’s tale: people can have meaningful, successful adult lives without years of schooling as children and have done so since the dawn of humanity. Indeed, as I’ll show , children can learn to program computers and use technology in clever ways just by working together and without any adult instruction, as the work and research of Sugata Mitra demonstrate.

Mitra is also working with western students in classrooms that expand upon the hole-in-the-wall concept in the US, the UK, South America, and other places to see, as Mitra puts it, how children can learn anything in a group with a computer and an Internet connection. He proved this in one of his hole-in-the-wall experiments where he asked "How far can children go on their own if you give them a difficult subject to learn?" This slide of Mitra's sums the task up:

When Mitra returned to the village a couple of months later he described the situation this way:

So I tested them. I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time. Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. Thirty percent is a fail. How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time.

So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"

So she says, "Absolutely not. I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you."

I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother."

So she says, "What's that?"

I said, "Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.' You know what grannies do."

So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 50 percent. Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.

The social aspect of learning is clearly present in Mitra’s work, as is the element of independent thought. Why do we doubt that our children can learn on their own and together and ask us for help when needed? If other children aren’t available to brainstorm with the child, that’s when a parent or other adult can help (which, as Mitra shows, is primarily to provide encouragement for learning).

Finding a mentor, teacher, class, book, Internet site, or person who can explain or help our children do what they want to know is not that hard nor does it require a degree in education. Any parent can do this if they want to, and you will get better at it the more you ask. Eventually, your children will be doing it on their own, getting their own books out of the library, asking to take lessons or do travel, because you have modeled this behavior for them. You help your children learn about how to navigate the world by doing your learning in front of them.

When Holt was writing and advocating for children to have more time to play and discover the world in their own ways and time frames in the 1980s, our schools and social policies were moving in the opposite direction. Their solution was to put more emphasis on tests, use technology to further control the learning time and focus of children, and to expand both the entrance and exit ages for school in order to keep them in school and out of their neighborhoods for longer periods. Schooling became more intensive, as we saw in the 1990s up until today: academics have trumped play time to the point that most American public schools no longer have play recess during the day. Even our preschools have been infected with the fever of to instill academics in very young children.

An article titled "The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids: Today’s young children are working more, but they’re learning less" presents research that shows that preschool teachers are saying the children in their care are less inquisitive and engaged than those in previous classes they had: what changed?

The high-stakes testing, rigorous curriculum, and no child left behind academic regime has caused arts, playtime, exercise, and other so-called frills of education to be disregarded in education, and provides authoritarian parents with plenty of support for keeping children's noses to the grindstone at ever earlier ages and for longer periods of schooling. As the researchers note, children learn from both spontaneous exploration and explicit instruction, but educators and policymakers have succeeded in making explicit instruction the norm. The change is not without serious side effects on children—the loss of curiosity that spurs intrinsic motivation, personal discovery, and the sense of mastery one gets from that knowledge.

Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society, wrote about what he called the “paradoxical counterproductivity” of modern institutions and education in particular; Holt agreed but used more common language to describe it: Holt wrote, "Schools are places where children learn to be stupid."

This position is less starkly stated by researchers, but the point remains the same. For instance, Dr. Richard Medlin, in his study of Predictors of Academic Achievement in Home Educated Children, found:

The lower the level of direct instruction, the shorter the “teaching” year and the less frequently rewards and grades were used, resulted in higher levels of achievement. Ironically, parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their homeschooling experience when their programs were more intensive.

The paper I show on the slide above is by researchers at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, and they sum up there findings quite clearly in the title of their paper: “The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery.” What they found in their experiments was that after direct instruction from teachers, “children are less likely to perform potentially irrelevant actions but also less likely to discover novel information.” In other words, the kids are compliant but less adventurous in their thinking.

Of course, if you fail in school it is your own fault, never the school’s. It is sour grapes if you say it is the school, because others graduated and they are doing fine, right? That’s one of the reasons school is so impervious to change: we valorize educators and education—in the U.S. we have bumper stickers that say “If you can read this thank a teacher”—but why isn’t the flip side also on bumper stickers; “If you hate math, thank a teacher;” “If you don’t like to read, thank a teacher”? No, the flip side is always that you didn’t try hard enough, or you aren’t smart enough, to do well in school. And so we blame ourselves for our school failures, or school will blame our genetics and urge drugs to make students focus properly, or blame factors beyond their control such as poverty or parenting without considering how the structure of conventional schooling can cause aberrant behavior in children.

Can we stop viewing the problem as something that is wrong with our children and instead start asking what’s wrong with our schools? Apparently not: school just gets more intensified, more children are labeled as learning disabled and are being kept in school settings for longer and longer periods of time, and even adults, in this age of Big Data and surveillance, are being subjected to ongoing mandatory continuing education and certifications. The ancient dream of John Amos Comenius, the so-called father of education, is that everyone will learn everything perfectly from their instructors—and it is now engulfing us into womb-to-tomb compulsory education.

Dr. Peter Gray spoke at your conference last year, and I’m honored to say we have been colleagues for several years now. Peter’s work with how children learn through play is vitally important and he is inspired by John Holt’s work—John wrote a lot about the value of children’s fantasy play and play in general, and he advised unschoolers to always let their children play as much as they wanted to. Peter Gray’s book is titled, Free To Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Betters Students for Life. Peter joins many educators who have written on this topic, but he brings his expertise as a research professor in psychology to the table. In his book Peter notes, too, how so-called primitive people allow children to live and learn informally while the adults do their own things and how effective this method is. Further, Peter details how children learn through play, observation, and conversation with other children.

Here's an interesting quote from Peter’s book:

Indeed, there is some experimental evidence that children in the United States pay less attention to what is going on around them, and thereby learn less through observation, than do children in traditional non-Western cultures. In one such experiment, Maricela Correa-Chávez and Barbara Rogoff compared the observational learning of children in a traditional Mayan culture in Guatemala with that of middle-class European-American children in California. The procedure was to bring pairs of siblings into the laboratory and to teach one child how to build a certain interesting toy (a moving mouse or a jumping frog) while the other one sat nearby and was given a different toy to play with. Then, in the crucial test, the child who had not been taught to build the toy, but who could have learned by observation, was asked to build it. The result was that the untaught Guatemalans demonstrated significantly more understanding of how to build the toy than did the untaught Americans. Moreover, within the Guatemalan group, those from the most traditional Mayan families learned more, through observation, than did those from the more Westernized families.

The Lego Foundation recently endowed a Lego Professorship at Cambridge University that will study the role of play in children’s development and their research shows that children should learn mainly through play until age 8. But who is really paying attention to this information other than a few educators and us? School proceeds as it always has, aided by the latest fads and money-making concepts that promise to turn students who are made of lead into students made of gold. I must mention that the father of modern education, John Amos Comenius, was an alchemist, so this analogy is particularly apt.

It’s not that teachers are bad people or that schools are intrinsically evil places, it is that we’ve removed children from the world and placed them into a special world created just for them and we act as if there is no other possible way for children to learn, despite evidence to the contrary.

Compulsory schooling is not a controlled experiment—there was no control group of children who learned outside of school compared to those who attended school and then through careful research schools determined what practices can best help children learn. No, we just forced children into school and that became their self-contained world.

As noted several times by me already, many people have seen and written about the coming demise of childhood and now it is before our eyes as children are rarely seen even after school hours in the U.S. because they are all in enrichment or other after-school programs. There are record numbers of children struggling in school—and sometimes violently acting out against the school as we see in Colombine and Sandy Hook in the U.S.—many other students never complete college, require drugs and counseling to get through school, or, sadly, commit suicide because all they can imagine is their small world of school and its limited choices, which becomes unbearable for them.

Prof. Neil Postman, hardly a radical educator, wrote a very good book in 1988, The Disappearance of Childhood.  Postman makes a point in this book that is worth remembering the next time someone tells you that school is scientifically based on the latest research about child development so how dare you think you, an uncertified parent, can educate your own child. Postman writes:

… by writing sequenced textbooks and by organizing school classes according to calendar age, schoolmasters invented, as it were, the stages of childhood. Our notions of what a child can learn or ought to learn, and at what ages, were largely derived from the concept of sequenced curriculum; that is to say, from the concept of the prerequisite.

… the point is that the mastery of the alphabet and the mastery of all the skills and knowledge that were arranged to follow constituted not merely a curriculum but a definition of child development. By creating a concept of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills, adults invented the structure of child development.

 Holt wrote in Escape From Childhood about the history of childhood and how modern society infantilizes children compared to children of the past. Prof. Stephen Mintz, in his wonderful book Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, provides much more detail about this, including how Dr. Stanley Hall invented the developmental stage we call “adolescence” in the early 20th century. Mintz notes how this concept was leveraged during the Great Depression, which led “financially hard-pressed marketers and manufacturers to target children as independent consumers . . . by the end of the decade a new age category, the teenager, had emerged, personified in the movies by Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Lana Turner. One of the Depression’s lasting legacies was nationalizing and commercializing childhood.”

Many parents rely on the childcare that school provides while they work or care for others, so this system is pretty firmly in place going forward. But cracks are showing all over schooling today and rather than redesign or offer alternatives those in charge are doubling-down: longer school days, more homework, more rigorous curriculum, more seat time and lectures. As this trend was emerging in the 1980s a popular American educator, Ted Sizer, wrote:

Learning is a human activity, and depends absolutely (if often annoyingly) on human idiosyncracy. We can arrange for schools, classes, and curricula, but the game is won or lost for reasons beyond these arrangements. The readiness of the students, the power of the incentives they feel for learning, and the potency of teachers’ inspiration count more than does any structure of any school. Run a school like a factory, and you will get uneven goods.

John Holt made this same point in his many books, starting with his first, How Children Fail, in 1964. In one of his last books, Teach Your Own: A Hopeful Path for Education, John made the point that homeschoolers are providing educators and researchers with valuable information and opportunities to study how children learn in a variety of situations and about parental involvement in education. Holt also urged classroom teachers to conduct research based on their teaching experiences, not controlled lab experiments, just as Holt did and many of the other teacher-writers did during the 1960s and 1970s.

This is why John was able to embrace homeschooling—he felt parents who wanted to pay attention to their children would learn how to best help them learn and grow, just as John himself did with his students. John did not have a college degree in education, nor did he spend his early years working in schools. When he did become a private school teacher he took his job seriously, and all the notes and memos from his teaching became the basis for his first two books.

Learning from one’s experience can take time and lots of self-reflection; but this is often taken away from us in school, which demands quick answers and test results to prove things are working in order to move on to the next item on the curriculum. It took John nearly 10 years to formulate his thoughts and feelings about teaching and schooling before he wrote his first book; give yourself and your children some slack! Enjoy slow homeschooling—your time with your children will disappear before you know it. Don’t turn your home into an overscheduled, overstuffed school: John liked to say that the chief educational mission of our time is not to make our homes more like school, but to make school less like school.

John wrote often and enthusiastically about self-directed learning for people of all ages. Indeed, John took up the cello in his fifties, largely to experience what it is like to be a learner from scratch but also to see if it was true what so many music educators told parents: if you don’t start your child on the cello (or violin, or whatever) when young they’ll never be able to do it when they are older because of all the habits and poor coordination they will have due to their age. John got good enough to play in a chamber music quartet and loved to play his cello whenever he can; the book he wrote about it Never Too Late, is a joyous musical autobiography that has more information about Holt’s personal life than his other books.

Self-directed education is the key element for unschooling to occur, and, as Ted Sizer’s quote shows, even in conventional school having a student buy-in to the class or teacher overcomes most obstacles to learning. Choosing to learn something is vital to effectively learn; otherwise it is a scattershot effort.

But when Holt uses the phrases self-directed learning or personalized learning he means the learner chooses why, what, when, how, and from whom (if someone else is necessary) to learn. But most people claim children won’t learn anything that they’ll need to know when they become adults if they are allowed this freedom as children. That’s why a child’s day must be filled with tasks and drills, to prepare them for their future work doing tasks and drills for others. But nobody knows with certainty what will be needed by the next generation of employers; today’s knowledge quickly becomes tomorrow’s dispute in the media that quickly becomes yesterday’s muddled old news.

Think of some of the more popular educational products that parents give to their children instead of giving their children a choice of what to do or study: Remember the Baby Einstein craze? Or the Better Baby Institute? Or using classical music to improve a child’s IQ—the so called Mozart Effect?  Each one of those methods has its advocates, but none have been found to genuinely improve a child’s IQ in any meaningful way. (Remember Dr. Medlin’s research, and how parents felt better about instructing their children even if it was shown to be less effective than letting the child learn it in their own way . . . )

Instead of working on children to make them do what we want them to do, why can’t we work with children to help them do what they want, and in that process develop the trust and relationship necessary so a child will eventually listen to you if you ask or tell them something that you think is important for them to know or do. Yes, this takes patience and lots of time on the adults’ part, but that’s what unschooling gives you: lots of time. You don’t have to run through the lesson plans and check off boxes that show accomplishments; you can teach through conversation, through your displays of integrity and patience, through playing fair, by having fun together. Direct instruction is just a piece of the picture, but in school, it is the entire picture.

The thing is, many classroom teachers know they need to allow more freedom, play, and self-agency in their classes—even at the college level—but they don’t find any support for it and they are conditioned to move from one lesson plan to the next based on the dictates of the school schedule, so many quickly give up the fight to do such things in their classrooms and they just buckle down and get with the program.

Self-directed education in unschooling is thoroughly different: if a child finds an interest, such as learning to play the piano or computer programming and sticks with it, most people think that’s okay. But if they move from one interest to another, or burn through all the material about identifying birds in the library or online and then never look at bird books again, parents, and educators in particular, get worried and think unschooling is failing and they must focus the child on more academic matters. But the child is focusing, just not on the schedule and subjects you wish they would focus on, and having a multitude of interests is not necessarily a sign of ADD or hyperactivity or school phobia.

Birds, planes, plants, computers, tools, cars—the world at large—all are in a child’s reach to observe and perhaps even manipulate when they learn among adults who want the child to explore and ask questions about their experience of the world. This sometimes leads to an intense interest in a particular subject, such as how learning karate when she was five years old spurred our youngest daughter to learn about Japanese culture and study its language for a few years—all of which never could have happened in our local school, except, perhaps, as an after-school activity. However, we used her Japan studies in our homeschooling reports to school officials as her primary learning activity in those years. That Audrey no longer is interested in Japanese culture and language is not an issue; she got out of it what she needed and it fed her ongoing interest in health and food: she is 23 now, has a college degree in diet and nutrition, works for a chiropractor, and loves to work out. That’s what self-directed education is—truly personalized learning that lets a child spread their wings as much as they can and that can move them into new places, new people, and new ideas. However, this is not what personalized learning means for educators today.

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced a new philanthropic organization aimed at supporting the newest reform in education: personalized learning. His group acknowledges the term is still vague, but I’m afraid there’s no doubt where this is going to go. It will result in personalized learning meaning children must choose from a selection of prepackaged courses that will be customized to how they use a computer to learn. It isn’t about finding a dojo and a Japanese tutor in your area, and creating local connections with real people. It’s about completing coursework aligned to state curricula that is “personalized” as to how you complete the coursework using a computer.

John Holt noted that it isn’t how or what you teach children that determines what sort of adult they become, but how they are treated. Allowing children the freedom to think and learn about the world in their own time frames and schedules is not what most entrepreneurs, corporations or governments are thinking when they use the phrase personalized learning. Make no doubt about it, when they use this phrase they mean the teacher is in charge and it will be done through the impersonal media of computers. For instance, Susan D. Patrick, the executive director of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Vienna, VA, told Education Week this year:

But she added that personalized learning must also promote "student agency"—basically, giving students more power through either digital tools or other means, accounting for how they learn best, what motivates them, and their academic goals. The most effective digital tools support that purpose, she said.

"Technology can help provide students with more choices on how they're going to learn a lesson," Ms. Patrick said. "[It] empowers teachers in personalizing learning" and "empowers students through their own exercise of choice."
(From http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/22/09pl-overview.h34.html)

(I must note how Orwellian the phrase personalized learning can be, much like the illusion of choice fast-food chains offer: you can only purchase a hamburger, but you can have it your way!)

The more I think about it, the more I don’t understand why educators, or at least education entrepreneurs, aren’t all over homeschooling and unschooling as sources for learning about personalized learning and parental involvement in education. Is it because educators can’t be equal partners with families, that families must always serve the school first? Is it because modern educators feel they can’t manage learning that can’t be controlled and measured? The school factory ignores these disruptive measures and philosophies and conventional schooling continues unabated into the 21st century, soon to be staffed by robots and computer programs disguised as personalized learning.

The only reform for this is to create a new system, a new path into adulthood that can’t be worn down and made indebted to an education system that dominates people's lives, and that is where homeschooling and unschooling come in to play. Alternative schools have been around for some time in the U.S. and UK and other parts of the world, but they are hard to replicate, cost a fair amount of money to run, and require lots of parental support and involvement in the school’s mission. Homeschooling is far more easily replicated, as its worldwide growth continues to indicate, and it isn’t as costly as public and private schools.

Further, blacksmiths, musicians, artists, martial arts, computer programmers, gardeners, grocers, graduate students, and just about anyone you or your child can approach can be potential teachers or mentors in their subject areas. You don’t need to worry about purchasing a world-class curriculum and getting a college degree in education in order to administer it (although if you look through advertisements for curricula you will sometimes see the phrase “teacher proof” used to describe them, which makes you wonder what going to a school of education is all about).

Studies show that unschooling is growing slowly and steadily, but homeschooling is growing faster. People are more comfortable teaching the way they were taught, so buying and administering a conventional curriculum feels right for them. What I find heartening are the number of conventional homeschoolers who, either because they and their children think the curriculum is boring or because their children get so involved in other activities (dance, raising and caring for animals, theater, sports, computers, etc.) that the parents stop pushing the curriculum and start embracing their children’s pursuits. They help their children find books about dance, take courses about animals, take acting classes, work with a sports coach and realize how learning one subject well requires a variety of skills that children learn. They may be the same skills on the curriculum—reading, writing a cogent report, calculating numbers—but they are learned as part and parcel of their new activity. These parents may never call themselves unschoolers, but that is what they are doing once they start to support their child’s development and ignore the curriculum’s developmental milestones.

Much of what I described today is about elementary and secondary school age children, but I think the situation gets worse at the college level, because now the stakes are quite high, financially and personally. College has gotten to be so expensive in the U.S. that some graduates have six-figure debts to repay starting upon their graduation at age 21. What a millstone to tie on a young person, and all on the assumption that a college degree will give them a leg up economically on every one else!

Many are finding, especially in today’s economy, that they must work in restaurants and other minimum-wage jobs despite their college degrees, and there’s a despair among our American young that no amount of education is going to provide them with the same level of financial security their parents had. We are made to feel, explicitly and implicitly in the U.S., that if you don’t go to college you will never make a good living, and since so many young adults drop out of college there is a sense that they are now trapped, destined to be burger flippers and street sweepers. These young adults, and many older adults, feel trapped by their circumstances because they either can’t afford more schooling (the typical answer given to older workers seeking jobs) or they don’t trust school as an option (as many millennials see they were sold a bill of goods about how they were being prepared for jobs that don't exist by their schools).

The suicide rate for teenagers in America is shocking, and I’ve mentioned the school attacks perpetrated by students against students in the U.S., and the poor U.S. economy is also driving up the suicide rates for white, middle-class men. But I was saddened to read in the Irish Times that Ireland has a similar problem.

Padraig O’Morain wrote about the suicide problem in Galway, where young students in despair drown themselves in the Corrib River. In his column on Monday, May 2, he writes:

“In the wild, the animal that loses out in a conflict very often goes off to join another herd. So there’s an escape, and an alternative. In humans, because of how we’ve constructed society, it’s all too easy to think that there is no escape. I mentioned students above.

Look at the extraordinary pressures we put young people under now, starting with the years leading up to the Leaving Cert and ending only after university but maybe, after all that, working in a crappy job.

It must be awfully easy to feel trapped and to imagine that there is no escape. Indeed, Prof. Mark Williams talk about “contemporary society with its fear-based school system that prioritizes examination grades as the central criterion of success, then wonder why many children and young people disengage.”

The fear in the system is a fear of the loss of status, not being able to hold your head up with other people, of failing to meet expectations. And it’s all too easy to get trapped in that fear.”

I could continue with other studies, quotes, books, and biographies that amply support self-directed education, and if you’re interested there is more research and support for you to read on my website, www.johnholtgws.com, in my update to Holt’s Teach Your Own, and on www.alternativestoschool.com that I cofounded with Peter Gray and others. Plus I frequently cite research and news articles about unschooling and self-directed education on my Twitter account, @patfarenga, and on the John Holt/Growing Without Schooling Facebook page.

But research only goes so far. If your children are being hurt in school, you don’t need a research study to tell you that something has to be done. If their classes and teachers bore your children, you don’t need a research study to switch them into another situation.

But homeschooling is not just a reaction to school techniques, it is also as a reaction to schooling as the institutional gateway to the ethos of competitive consumer culture, to schoolings’ service as a social sorting machine, and to schoolings’ continual push to segregate young people from old people in ways that enable educational institutions to take over many of the duties and responsibilities of parents and local communities.

Teachers in school may need all the training and certifications they do in order to work in schools, but such training is not transferable to unschooling. Indeed, I’m aware of professors, private, and public school teachers who homeschool and unschool their children because they prefer that their children learn this way and not in the school way.

The fact is, teaching and learning has always been a human endeavor, it's only in recent human history that teaching and learning have become institutionalized. People have always learned and created things regardless of whether a school or university existed. Certainly being able to use a school or university for one’s own purposes, much as one would use a public library, would be a welcome change, but most universities won’t allow this cafeteria approach to their offerings. Fortunately, the Internet is providing unschoolers with access to a great library and homeschoolers and unschoolers have good track records of getting into and graduating from college regardless of their unconventional educations.

If I listened to the education research and homeschooling’s critics back in 1981, when I started work with John Holt, I might have dropped homeschooling and gone into something else. But John made me rediscover an important truth about living and learning when he introduced me to unschooling: true learning isn’t about passing tests, being top of the class, and getting academic accolades, and true teaching isn’t about transmitting information to another person. True learning is about learning what is meaningful to you, and a good teacher shows you how to teach yourself; they should not make you dependent on them.

But the most powerful insight I got was this: learning can be and usually is a social activity, not the lonely, school test-taker image of learning. Learning is based on relationships: when you feel connected to the people, places, and things in your life it is easier to learn new things than if you feel unconnected. Learning is state dependent: if you are in a bad state, say your pet dog died that morning and you didn’t eat breakfast, you are not going to be in a mood to learn no matter how enthusiastic and well prepared that teacher is.

That’s another reason so much of the research about school doesn’t help us for learning at home and in our communities—education research considers student–teacher relationships and students’ personal feelings as far less important than the professional enterprise of education. But education, especially for young children, is all about feelings and relationships and that is why unschooling is successful. You can always hire another tutor or teacher, try a new class or buy a better text, but you can’t get another parent or child, so work on your relationships and it will pay you great dividends. Don’t sacrifice your relationship with your children on the altar of education!

Having a good relationship with your children keeps communication flowing among you and enables you to follow your children’s lead as much as possible so they can show you what they like or want to learn and how you can best help them to learn it. I want to close with some words by John Holt about this. After years of teaching fifth grade and writing How Children Fail, John Holt wrote about the natural way that children learn before it gets diminished by school in his book How Children Learn in 1967. In 1983, after years of observing and supporting homeschoolers and unschoolers, John revised How Children Learn and added these closing words.