About Patrick Farenga

Patrick Farenga brings more than 42 years of fieldwork, advocacy, and personal experience to help parents and children learn in their own ways. Farenga is a writer and education activist who addresses academic and general audiences about working with children, not on children, to help them learn.

Farenga worked closely with one of the founders of the modern homeschooling movement, the late author and teacher John Holt, and continued publishing Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) after Holt’s death in 1985 until it stopped in 2001. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about learning without going to school, started by Holt in 1977.

Farenga speaks as a homeschooling expert at education conferences around the world—such as in Colombia, Ireland, France, England, Canada, and Italy—as well as on commercial radio, podcasts, and television talk shows in the United States (The Today Show, Good Morning America).

Farenga writes about homeschooling and self-directed learning and operates the John Holt/Growing Without Schooling website, www.johnholtgws.com. He is also a founding member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (www.self-directed.org).

Farenga’s most recent book is the new, revised edition of Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Hachette, 2021). His other books include The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling (Holt, 1998); The Legacy of John Holt: A Man Who Genuinely Understood, Trusted, and Respected Children (HoltGWS, 2013); and How to Report Unschooling to School Officials (HoltGWS, 2015).

Farenga has also written chapters about homeschooling in Encyclopedia Britannica (2014, 2010), A Parent's Guide to Homeschooling (Mars Publishing, 2002), Creating Learning Communities (FER, 2000), The Handbook of Alternative Education (Macmillan, 1994), The Exhausted School (Oxford Village, 1992), Schooling At Home (John Muir, 1990), and The Encyclopedia of School Administration (Sage, 1988).