At a meeting —very pleasant—of (mostly) sociologists at Harvard, someone said to me, "But if we educate children in the way you propose, how are they later going to fit on the tracks laid down by society?” The question showed me that he understood very clearly what schools are for—to make people think, as they had made him think, that the tracks that make a society of any particular moment are not only the best tracks, but the only possible tracks.

It is the worst kind of tactical and psychological error to try to combat the people who are debasing and corrupting our country and the flag, by trying to demean the flag itself. No, we ought to carry our own flag, display it in every way we can, especially in conjunction with other symbols we believe in.

Of my own seven books, perhaps the most immediately useful to unschoolers may be What Do I Do Monday? It suggests many specific ways in which children can explore the world (in writing, math, science, etc.), and learn and feel its wholeness and interconnectedness.—John Holt

There have always been some conventional and alternative schoolteachers who view John Holt’s work as a hopeful path for education. I hope that more will follow as declining enrollments, absenteeism, and public malaise about education have not been staunched by increasing standards, intensive instruction, and longer school days.

The fundamental educational problem of our time is to find ways to help children grow into adults who have no wish to do harm. We must recognize that traditional education, far from having ever solved this problem, has never tried to solve it. Indeed, its efforts have, if anything, been in exactly the opposite direction …

This video is a tribute to the groundbreaking work of John Holt, celebrating his amazing book "Learning All The Time."

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

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.”