John Holt's Last Speech About Homeschooling

John Holt sometimes used his Sony Walkman cassette recorder to tape his speeches and after his death I found two cassettes in his apartment. One is a speech he gave at the Smithsonian American History Museum on April 15, 1985, and it is damaged and unlistenable. But the deterioration of the second tape wasn’t as bad and I was able to have it restored to a decent listening experience. This is John’s last public speech, presented at the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools (NCACS) conference at the Clonlara School in Ann Arbor, MI on April 28, 1985.

The NCACS talk brought back so many memories to me since I was in charge of John’s medical care and personal finances in his final years. John was diagnosed with cancer, melanoma on one his legs, and he followed the doctor’s advice and was admitted to a hospital to remove the tumor in the late 1970s. However, on the day of the surgery a nurse marked the wrong leg for the operation. When John told the nurse this, he or she was dismissive and left the room. John decided he couldn’t trust the hospital with his care and immediately checked himself out. The tumor didn’t grow quickly after that, but when it did, starting around 1983, John started exploring all types of cancer therapies. He went to a hospital in IL to explore laser treatments, a naturopath clinic in Mexico, and tried wheat grass therapy. Finally, his friend and editor, Merloyd Lawrence, convinced John to see Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and Miracles, and the tumor was removed, but too late. Cancer had spread through John’s body. He wrote openly about this in Growing Without Schooling (GWS), describing how he wanted to use his remaining time playing and studying music and would therefore be raising his speaking fees so high that he would only get a few per year.

So here he is, giving this talk five months away from his death, nonetheless speaking clearly and deeply (and likely with no speaking fee!) about homeschooling to an audience of parents, children, and alternative educators. In one of his last letters about his cancer John wrote in GWS 43:

 …I am tired of talking to school people, educators, meetings of teachers, educational conferences,  and all that, tired of talking to people who are not really looking for new ideas of ways to improve their work, and who do not take seriously what I say and never did. Not only am I fed up with talking to school people, I am fed up with talking, reading, even thinking about schools. For some time, to people who have asked me, “Why have you given up on schools?” I have said that I haven’t given up on them, that I was as interested as I ever was in making them better, if only I could see a way to do it. I learned from my cancer that even if this was true for a while it is not true anymore. I have indeed given up on schools. According to Dr. John Goodlad, Dean of the School of Education at UCLA and author of the book A Place Called School, they have not changed in any important respect in close to a hundred years. They certainly haven’t changed in the forty years of my adult lifetime, except to get worse—bigger, more rigid, more bureaucratic, more fake-scientific, more incompetent, more full of excuses, and above all more greedy and ambitious—the N.E.A. now wants compulsory school to begin at age four! As I said in Instead of Education, they are bad because they start with an essentially bad idea, not just mistaken or impossible, but bad in the the sense of morally wrong, that some people have or ought to have the right to determine what a lot of other people know and think. As long as they start from this bad idea they cannot become better, and I don’t want to take part any longer in any public pretense they can. I am not going to waste any more time or energy—and I have wasted a great deal—trying to change them or make them better; all I want is for them to let those people who want to, teach their own children, and to bother these people as little as possible.

I feel fortunate to have known John and his circle of friends and to continue his work. Supporting people to use real life, a variety of people, local resources, and a wide number of texts and projects to help children learn isn’t a very profitable vocation. It is not something one can package, sell, and scale like a school curriculum, but it is a very vital and under appreciated aspect of how people learn. As John notes in this recording:

My interest in homeschooling and for that matter alternative schooling —and I was interested in alternative schools before I became interested in homeschooling. My interest in it is that it makes it at least possible for those people who want to give their children a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience to do so.

Not everybody is going to use it that way. People start schools which they hope will be even more coercive than the schools that exist. There are certainly some people who teach their children thinking that they can pound in learning faster than the local schools who were doing it. I don't think many of them stick it out very long because they find out it doesn't work.

… I mean if I look far enough down the line I like to think of schools as learning experiment activity centers. Somewhat analogous to public libraries, but rather wider in scope. Places to which people can come if they feel like coming to do the things that they want to do for as long as they want to do them. … I would hope that somewhere we would find a way to call these places something other than schools. Because they're really very fundamentally very different.

…We have to understand we're going to probably have to agree to disagree about this. Because nobody who walks into a room believing in some kind of forced learning is going to walk out of the room not believing in it because they've heard me preach this little mini-sermon about it. But I want you to be very clear about where I personally stand. And I should say, by the way, that I suspect that the number of homeschoolers or alternative school people who really agree with me is probably well under 50%. I mean, I think this is a minority even among homeschoolers.

You don't have to believe what I just said to be a homeschooler or to run an alternative school. But I'm the one who's sitting up here and that's what I think. …

While listening to this talk I’m struck not just by John’s insights about how schooling would continue on it’s trajectory of forced learning, but also how he notes how American businesses, politicians, and academia continually miss important aspects of the downsides of chasing cheap labor while supporting a system that’s supposed to increase one’s income through education. John’s opinion, in 1985, that China would likely rise to the economic top tier as a result of these policies is notable.

It is sad to see how people like John Holt, Ivan Illich, and others who saw the dangers of putting all our education eggs in the basket of compulsory schooling are ignored by those who control the levers of power and markets. Giving children autonomy to learn, which Holt called “unschooling,” is considered dangerous and irresponsible by educators even though they know it is a vital part of everyone’s ability to learn. As I write this, I read an article in the NY Times (1/2/2025), “Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results.” The authors note, “In third grade, 74 percent of kids say they love school. By 10th grade, it’s 26 percent. School feels like prison, many teenagers told us over three years of research. The more time they spend in school, the less they feel like the author of their own lives, so why even try?” As you read the article it becomes clear that giving children in school some autonomy is just a means to make students more pliant with existing school practices; it is not a change of mind about where children can be and what they can do during the day:

In 35 randomized control trials in 18 countries, he and other researchers found that when students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers — and they are happier, too. The effect sizes were often between 0.7 and 0.9, a significant degree of impact.

Importantly, the teachers did not need to change the curriculum they taught or alter their disciplinary approach. They just applied a few new teaching practices in the course of their normal lesson. [My emphasis—PF]

I’m glad that teachers now have research that supports having them talk to their students with a reasoning tone instead of a controlling tone, but shouldn’t there be more than just manipulating language to create a real level of autonomy for children’s learning? There is not one word in this article about the history and work of the many educators, homeschools, and alternative schools that give children true autonomy that helps them become successful adults.

Fortunately, those who want to let children have “a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience” can do so, though the doors are shutting on this option in several countries, such as France and Germany. This is why we need to use and protect this space for our children and ourselves, because the forces of standardization and the pressure to compete in a global race for higher test scores are squeezing out the time, space, and resources we need to create our local, personal, and communal connections for living and learning. I hope listening to John’s talk will encourage you to consider other ways we can help children learn and grow besides the school schedule.