John Holt
By Roland Meighan, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007. Volume 5 in The Continuum Library of Educational Thought. Series editor: Richard Bailey
Foreword by Patrick Farenga
John Holt is a rare writer about education because he brought about changes not only in schools, but also in our homes. Holt was a major influence on the school reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and then, when he decided most people did not want schools to change in the progressive, learner-centered ways he advocated, he became a major influence on the modern homeschooling movement. Equally remarkable for someone working in the field of education, Holt wrote all his books in a deliberately accessible style for the general public and he did this as an independent researcher, without affiliation to, or the support of, any university or public or private institution. When How Children Fail became a national best-seller in 1964, Holt was encouraged by a friend to enter the world of academia instead of becoming an independent critic. Holt responded, in a letter quoted in A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (Ohio State Univ. Press, 1992):
I am trying to find out why the capacity of so many children for perceiving, and learning, and thinking, declines so rapidly as they grow older, and what we could do to prevent this from happening … I am very firmly convinced that a university tie would hinder my work far more than it would help it … I can think of a number of projects that I have carried out in past years, in my own classes or with individual children. From these I have learned a great deal. None of them would have been considered a research project as a university ordinarily understands the word. … I explore the intelligence of children by creating situations and then seeing how they respond to them and what they make of them. I am truly exploring, and an explorer does not know, when he starts into a bit of unknown country, what he is going to find there. But this is not how most of what passes for educational research is done, or how research proposals are written up…… For the time being, it seems a matter [working for a university—PF] of spending a large part of my time doing things their way in the hope that they will allow me to spend some of my time doing things my way. I can’t see it; life is too short, and I believe that I can learn far more and even have more influence working as I am.
Holt’s clear-headed vision about his work in this letter show an almost prescient knowledge of his later transformations of thought and opinion as a public intellectual, education writer, school reformer, political activist, and a founder of the homeschooling movement. His independence of thought and descriptions about not just the techniques, but the emotions attached to teaching and learning continue to surprise readers, as well as to influence parents to homeschool their chiildren. His books have now been translated into over 20 languages, and they continue to generate adherents and controversy.
For instance, Holt’s vision of homeschooling, or “unschooling” as he preferred to call it in the early years of the movement, was not about doing school at home with one’s siblings and parents. Instead, it was about learning in and outside the home, in places and with people that do not resemble school at all. Holt viewed learning as an abundant, natural, human endeavor that gets warped or turned-off by imposing years of unasked-for teaching upon the learner. He envisioned not just families, but entire communities becoming places for life-long learning. Indeed, Holt’s writing continues to inspire people to create co-operative learning centers, and develop other forms of community-based activities for children and adults, defying the charge leveled against homeschoolers that they are only interested in their own children and circumstances. However, to use a current analogy from the world of high technology, most educators refuse to acknowledge Holt’s “open source” approach to education and insist on their “proprietary” approach to making children learn what they think they need to know month-by-month, year-by-year. Often, it seems that these rival visions of education are irreconcilable. Fortunately, Roland Meighan has written this wonderful exposition of John Holt’s work that provides us with a sensitive understanding of how these visions of education can, indeed, be reconciled.
Meighan summarizes Holt’s work in clear prose that Holt himself would have enjoyed, and Meighan puts Holt’s work in the context of our current times. Most professional educators and politicians dismiss Holt’s work as “romantic” and impractical because of the radical changes it could make to compulsory schooling. However, as Meighan points out, Holt’s ideas about teaching and learning are important and practical and they continue to be implemented and adapted by a variety of homeschooling parents and independent alternative schools. Read this book not only to learn about John Holt’s work, but about what you can do in your own life to personalize and make education meaningful not just to yourself, but for others as well. In this age of regressive, formulaic compulsory schooling, Roland Meighan’s book shows us how Holt’s work is truly radical, that is, it goes back to the root of education, and how people outside the school system can influence and change education in ways that reformers inside the school system can not.
