The Legacy of John Holt: A Man Who Genuinely Understood, Respected, and Trusted Children contains sixteen essays by friends, colleagues, and children (now adults) who personally knew and were influenced by Holt. A deep appreciation for Holt’s wide-ranging intellect, humor, and his ability to work with, not on, children emerge from these portraits. People who knew Holt when he was young write about his personal journey from conventional school teacher to unschooler, while pioneer homeschoolers write about the school, social, court room, and legislative battles Holt helped them negotiate at a time when the right to homeschool was often challenged.

Holt was far ahead of his time with his ideas about teaching and optimal environments for learning. Kirsten Olson, author of Wounded by School, notes in her introduction, “Holt’s observations and thoughts on the importance of pleasure while learning, how teaching can interfere with learning, and the psychosocial means through which teacher beliefs about pupils predict and create performance, are truths about human cognition now being proven in learning labs around the world.”

John Holt gained fame in the 1960s as an insightful school critic with his books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, both of which are still in print, been translated into over 40 languages, and combined have sold over 2 million copies. Frustrated by the slow pace of change in schools, Holt became one of the founders of the homeschooling movement in 1977, when he published the first magazine about learning outside school, Growing Without Schooling.

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In 2019, there were more than two million children being homeschooled. That number doubled during the pandemic and is now likely to continue increasing as more parents worry that school might not be the best place for their children to learn and grow. In October 2023 the Washington Post called homeschooling “the fastest growing form of education” in the United States.

Teach Your Own helped launch the homeschooling movement in 1981, and now its timeless and revolutionary message of recognizing the ways children come to understand the world has been updated for today’s environment.

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Teacher, school reformer, and author Deborah Meier writes about John’s influence in her introduction to this anniversary edition: "Putting John’s ideas into practice absorbed the next half century of my life. I always returned to his work to remind me of what we all shared: the fears that make learning harder and limit the intelligence of almost all of us."

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(Pitman 1964, revised edition Delacorte 1982, Perseus, 1995)+

John’s first book explores his efforts as a fifth-grade teacher in private schools that led him to conclude that school produces a charade of learning, where what is learned is forgotten after the test is done for the majority of students. John wanted an answer to the question: “I teach, but they don’t learn. Why?” After his years of work considering and promoting alternatives to school, homeschooling in particular, Holt revised his two most famous works to incorporate his new insights.

When he revised How Children Fail and How Children Learn in 1982 Holt left the original text intact, interspersed with his new material (indented and marked with a line running along the left margin). This is to show how Holt himself was learning all the time and how people can be self-correcting.

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"Can schools do all the things we ask them to do? Are they the best means of doing it? What might be other or better ways?" asks John Holt while looking at the role schooling in society plays in education. The solutions proposed by Holt in Freedom and Beyond mark a significant turning point in Holt's work and is the foundation of all his subsequent writing. This book offers a historical understanding of the free school movement of the 1960s and 1970s while still speaking directly to today's school reform debate. Freedom and Beyond also paved the way for the alternatives to school movement, by challenging conventional schooling as the best way for people to learn and grow and presenting evidence that self-directed education produces equal or better results for less physical, emotional, and financial cost than our current education system. This book also examines why the school system wasn't able to change over fifty years ago, and Holt's ideas and analysis seem even more important today, when words like "discipline," "authority," and "choice" are bandied about without the deep investigation of them that Holt provides us with.

"More relevant than ever, and an important read for any educator or parent.”—Dr. Kirsten Olson, author of Wounded By School and Schools As Colonizers

“The problems Holt addresses here are even more pressing, and his insights even more relevant, now than they were 45 years ago when the first edition was published. It's time to pay attention. It's time for good sense to prevail."—Dr Peter Gray, author Free to Learn

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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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The essence of John Holt's insight into learning and small children is captured in Learning All The Time. This delightful book by the influential author of How Children Fail and How Children Learn shows how children learn to read, write, and count in their everyday life at home and how adults can respect and encourage this wonderful process. For human beings, he reminds us, learning is as natural as breathing. John Holt's wit, his gentle wisdom, and his infectious love of little children bring joy to parent and teacher alike.

From the book:

“When I talk with parents abut the dangers of unwanted help, they will often ask how to tell the difference between being responsive and being intrusive. I usually suggest that they let their children tell them the difference. Since the children won't do it with words, probably, this means being alert to their signals.

The most difficult challenge is not to have hurt feelings when they send a ‘leave me alone, let me do it’ signal. If children send such a signal, parents needn't apologize or make a big thing of it; they can just say, ‘Sure,’ and go on about their business.”

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John Holt (1983–1985) is the author of How Children Learn and How Children Fail, which together have sold over a million and a half copies, and eight other books about children and learning. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. Once a leading figure in school reform, John Holt became increasingly interested in how children learn outside of school. The magazine he founded, Growing Without Schooling (GWS), reflects his philosophy, which he called unschooling. GWS was published from 1977 to 2001 and is the first magazine devoted to homeschooling and self-directed education.

Each GWS volume contains the complete text of each issue, reformatted to be easy to read, without the advertisements, Family Directory, and book sale catalogs from those issues.

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This new volume includes much writing by John Holt about living and learning with children that is not published elsewhere, as well as many striking stories and first-hand accounts of self-directed education from readers—primarily in the U.S. but also from around the world—about the challenges and concerns they face as homeschoolers and unschoolers.

Each GWS volume contains the complete text of each issue, reformatted to be easy to read, without the advertisements, Family Directory, and book sale catalogs from those issues.

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This volume covers the years after the first edition of Teach Your Own came out. GWS Volume 3 is filled with writing by John Holt and unschoolers from the last years of Holt’s life. After working to change schools from within—testifying before Congress and addressing audiences around the world about how to make schools better places for children—John Holt founded Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine.

Each GWS volume contains the complete text of each issue, reformatted to be easy to read, without the advertisements, Family Directory, and book sale catalogs from those issues.

Please scroll down to view additional formats you can purchase.

Four years after the first edition of Teach Your Own came out, this volume is filled with writing by John Holt and unschoolers from the last years of Holt’s life. After working to change schools from within—testifying before Congress and addressing audiences around the world about how to make schools better places for children—John Holt founded Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine. GWS was published from 1977 to 2001 and is the first magazine devoted to homeschooling and self-directed education.

Each GWS volume contains the complete text of each issue, reformatted to be easy to read, without the advertisements, Family Directory, and book sale catalogs from those issues.

Please scroll down to view additional formats you can purchase.