Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children
Escape From Childhood is Holt’s attempt to go beyond school reforms to show ways that society as a whole can help children learn and grow into responsible adults. It examines our peculiar institution of childhood, one that systematically denies young people responsible choices, while expecting them to assume this same responsibility at an arbitrarily determined age, and proposes many ideas we can implement that would make society more welcoming to young people.
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Emma Marie Forde is unschooling mom to two girls, Lily and Rosa. She's also the founder of the website, rethinkingparenting.co.uk. Before having children, Emma was a clinical psychologist, a career that informed her choice to stay home with her own children and to choose unschooling.
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Kirsten Olson, author of Wounded By School (Teachers College Press), writes, “Childhood as a walled garden—safe, protected, and innocent—is a fiction in Holt's view, essentially an early 20th century construction that we must release children from. With his usual profound interest in observing children in the world, Holt presents a series of arguments about the nature of childhood that any serious educator or parent should thoughtfully explore.”
Dr. Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn (Basic Books) says, “John Holt’s Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, is as fresh and thought-provoking today as it was when it was first published 39 years ago, and its message is even more essential now than it was then. In the past four decades we have seen progress in the rights of all people—except children. For children, we have moved backwards. We, in modern-day America, underestimate children’s abilities to make reasonable judgments far more than have any other people at any other place or time in history. In the name of protecting children we hurt them, sometimes viciously. As Holt shows brilliantly, children need the same rights to advance their own interests and protect themselves as we grant to adults.”
Holt's eloquent, insightful, and highly controversial book about how we can gradually let children decide what constitutional rights they wish to exercise in their lives, such as the right to think and learn about topics they are interested in, choosing their own guardians, and voting.
Since this book tends to make people upset or energized (there appears to be no middle ground among its readers), I'm linking to two of my blog posts that provide excerpts from the book and some reviews to give you a flavor of what you will encounter when you read it from cover to cover.
I've added a podcast by Pam Larichia and Emma Marie Forde from Nov. 2017 that explores Escape From Childhood in detail.
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"Astonishingly cogent. John Holt's book is touching in its beautiful respect for children and its insistence on their dignity.”
—The New York Times
"In 1974 John Holt wrote Escape from Childhood, The Needs and Rights of Children. It’s a radical book, as almost all social reform books of the seventies were. It still looks radical to parents and educators today. But his points, in that book, that children are overly controlled, and grossly underestimated, are just as valid today. If you’re bravely wading into the mysterious pool of unschooling and haven’t read that book, it might get you thinking about children and what they can do and what they ought to be able to try, with your experienced help and guidance.”
—Deb Lewis