John Holt: “I have met some fine teachers who have told me that for as long as twenty years or more they have been working in this or that school or system to bring about some of the kinds of changes I am urging, and with no success at all. I can admire their courage but not their tactical judgment. Not only have they wasted their time, skill, and devotion; they have given them to an institu­tion that has made bad use of them.”

All of those complaints are valid, and I’m certainly someone who, with four children, does a lot of driving to activities in the course of a week. We’re all really happy with those activities that the children are involved in, but it certainly does involve a lot of car time. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about that car time, and about the positive side of it. 

John Holt sometimes used his Sony Walkman cassette recorder to tape his public talks, and this one, on April 29, 1985, turned out to be his last. The sound quality deteriorated a lot on this tape, so I had it remastered successfully and I hope you enjoy the audio. John was dealing with cancer during this talk and he died on Sept. 14, 1985. Nonetheless, John continued to share and explain his ideas about education in an amiable manner at this event, enjoying his interactions with the children and adults, and making some off-hand comments about Shakespeare and other educational topics that will infuriate some and tickle others.

A recent article in the UK Guardian cites successful unschoolers, but the overall tone is that children are being harmed or neglected because of unschooling. Unschooling isn’t just about leaving your child alone to figure things out, as these stories show.

Students give U.S. schools middling to poor grades, and the majority of parents are dissatisfied with their schools. Yet school continues to offer its one-size-fits-all approach as the way to fix things.

Supporting a child’s learning takes time, observation, and empathy, all things that are lacking in most schools. This is largely due to institutional practices and schedules, but this obstacle is not necessary in one’s home, if one is attuned to their children’s natural growth rather than a planned curriculum.

So sensitive are we to the possibility of child labor in the exploitative sense that we’ve made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for children to work at all, even when they want or need to. The following piece of unpublished writing by John Holt may help clarify some of these issues.

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.”

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.”