“School should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know…”

This is an eternal question for parents, but for many in the unschooling and alternative school communities it can be a very divisive topic. Madeline Murphy writes, “We have found that there is an ebb and flow to the amount of structure and to the amount of direction we provide in our children’s learning, but we are always involved.”

Almost every child on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling—or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life.

Lidya Foxglove writes: “I was unschooled through most of my childhood and never went to college. I’ve gotten questions and sometimes pushback about it all my life but I think it helped me to my writing career as well as living intentionally.”

John Holt’s books are translated into over 40 languages. Here are three of the most recent ones, one from Italy and two from Russia. It’s not just English-speaking countries that desire to change how their children learn in school!

Unschooling isn’t and can’t be a solution for many of the problems of being young, or growing up in an anxious and confused world, or in a society that generally has no use for young people. But at least homeschooling doesn’t make those problems worse.

John Holt: “I have always said, but never with an example as eloquent and persuasive as this, that though the child may not know what he may need to know in ten years, he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know next, in short, what his mind is ready and hungry for.”

Just as school is not really an effective preparation for life, neither should life be considered a preparation for school.

There are methods and curricula that don’t follow the authoritarian model of schooling, but they are dismissed as not being academically rigorous or too coddling for serious educators. Despite this dubious claim, alternative schools, homeschooling, private and charter schools continue to grow because the conventional system is not adapting to change—and there are cracks appearing in the authoritarian model that are worth noting.

Before the words homeschooling and unschooling existed, the word “deschooling” filled their space. What is that all about?

Welcome to the new JohnHoltGWS.com website!

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis wrote in Schooling in Capitalist America in 1976, ‘“In less than a decade, liberal preeminence in the field of educational theory and policy has been shattered. . . . Today, much of the free school rhetoric has been absorbed into the mainstream of educational thinking as a new wrinkle on how to get kids to work harder.”