Schools and Homeschoolers: A Fruitful Partnership

In How Children Fail and other books Holt argued that teachers should be in charge of their classrooms, not distant policy makers, a trend he identified in the 1960s. When he realized that wasn't going to happen he wrote about many different solutions—giving children the same rights as adults, proposing alternative methods and places for helping children to learn, citing alternative schools and social experiments like the Peckham Center in the UK, and eventually homeschooling as other ways to help children learn and grow in our society. John started writing about homeschooling in 1977 and always maintained that schools and homeschoolers should not be adversarial. Unfortunately, in those years, the schools dug in and took homeschoolers to court and lost many of those cases. Further, conservative homeschoolers who were politically and legally connected took control of the homeschooling narrative in its early years by framing it primarily as a religious freedom issue.

There have always been some conventional and alternative schoolteachers who viewed John’s work as a hopeful path for education. I hope that more will follow as declining enrollments, absenteeism, and a public malaise about education have not been staunched by increasing standards, intensive instruction, and longer school days. Deborah Meier wrote in her introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary publication of How Children Learn:

While following Holt’s deep exploration of how children learn I therefore wasn’t surprised to discover that Holt had joined “the enemy”—homeschoolers. His little magazine, Growing Without Schooling, was the most useful guide a teacher could ever read. As time passed I began to change my views of homeschooling. I’m still first and foremost working to preserve public education but homeschoolers can be our allies in devising what truly powerful schooling could be like. If we saw the child as an insatiable nonstop learner, we would create schools that made it as easy and natural to do so as it was for most of us before we first entered the schoolroom. Our task is to make schools ready for kids to learn in, not kids ready for school.

The problems schools face will not be solved just by creating more types of schooling, but by also creating more ways to integrate children into adult society. John describes some ways how that can happen in this article, Schools and Homeschoolers: A Fruitful Partnership, published in Phi Delta Kappan in 1983.