John Holt, Advocate of Home Education

 

John Holt (1923 – 1985) is best known as an educator and proponent of homeschooling. His views were considered radical and progressive. He once commented that “…the things I’m supposed to know so much about I never learned in schools”. During his lifetime, he studied children of all ages and worked as a fifth grade teacher. He found that babies and toddlers were bold and adventurous, but that by the time they reached ten years of age they became self-protecting, timid, and fearful. His research led him to believe that this was caused by fear, most of which was as a result of school experiences. He believed that children feared being ridiculed by their teacher and classmates and of having wrong answers to questions asked in school. He thought this trait was made worse by children being forced to study things that they had no interest in. It was his belief that the educational process be made much friendlier for children. He authored many books. His first, published in 1964, was called How Children Fail and it was very controversial. In it he said that he believed children failed academically because of schools, not despite of them. He believed that schools actually short circuited the learning process. His ideas about the educational process got many parents thinking and after some time families started to contact him, telling him that they were schooling their children at home. This started a relationship between him and the families of a budding homeschool movement. He started a newsletter called Growing Without Schooling in 1977 which focused on homeschooling. His philosophy of education is aptly voiced in his statement that “I don’t see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were.” He was an advocate for educational reform until his death.

Teach Your Own

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