JOHN HOLT: ON TEACHING YOUR OWN AND OTHER HERESIES

The reason? John Holt's latest book, "Teach Your Own", has been released, and from early returns it is likely to spark yet another major revolution in education, with its well-considered, strongly supported presentation of the value and feasibility of parents taking their children out of the schools and helping them to grown and learn themselves. Using his 4-year-old newsprint magazine, Growing Without Schooling, as a foundation and case-study source, Holt has fashioned a solid case for the home-schooling option -- addressed to parents, educational experts... and the school system itself.
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HISTORICAL UPDATE: The offices of Holt Associates ( <http://www.holtgws.com/ >), publishers of Growing Without Schooling, are no longer on Boylston Street, moved across the Charles River, to Cambridge, where they maintained the newsletter for several years after John's passing. The bookstore and its inventory has since been sold, (to < http://www.fun-books.com/ >), while the Holt Associates current address is PO Box 89, Wakefield, MA 01880-5011, on the northern edge of the Greater Boston area. ]

John Holt has been a teacher, educational innovator, writer, editor, publisher and lecturer for most of his adult life. Born in New York City in 1923, he attended a variety of public and private schools in both the City and its suburb-to-be, New Canaan, CT, before serving a hitch aboard a World War II Navy submarine. During the late 1940s and early 50s he worked for the World Federalist movement. From there it was a year abroad, four years teaching in a Colorado private school and, in 1958, a move to Boston, where he has remained ever since.

During this time he has written nine books, produced countless articles and speeches, and published 20-odd issues of Growing Without Schooling, which he began in 1977. He has fielded hundreds of interviews and thousands of phone calls, regarding everything from "What's wrong with the public schools?" to "How can I teach my child by myself?" He has been a celebrity, a maverick educator, a children's rights advocate, a legislative witness and a diligent administrator - all in the name of freer schools, wider opportunities for open education and, finally, the right of parents and their children to self-determination in education. (As if this weren't enough to fill several lifetimes, John took up the cello in his late 40s and has now taught himself to play, at least competently, this most difficult of instruments.)

Over the summer and fall of 1981, I conducted a series of interviews with John in his cramped but cozy office. Surrounded by shelves of books, piles of magazines and file-cabinets crammed with reference materials, we discussed everything from the GWS activities to Holt's iconoclastic theories about the Learning Disabilities industry to his feelings about the Libertarian Party and organizations in general. The following is a partial transcript:

WOULD YOU SUMMARIZE THE HISTORY OF JOHN HOLT ASSOCIATES?

HOLT: It actually goes back to about 1967. I had been teaching school, but as my books were published and I became more in demand as a lecturer, I left. At first I had a little office at the school, but had to move to [a commercial building] in the early 70s. For a while there were just two of us, Peggy Hughes and me, but with the sale of paperback rights on the books I had a lot more money than I could use myself, so I tried to expand the program. I thought we needed a counterpart to the British model of "advisors" - although in that case they were employed by the county educational system, they really were advisors, rather than supervisors or curriculum experts.

Initially, I was to underwrite a modest salary: The people would be paid for lecturing and advising by the schools; I'd make up the difference between [that] and what we'd agreed on; they'd become more independent and go off on their own. That's my theory about how organizations ought to go in general.

But none of that really happened. At one time we had as many as eight people, but most of the money was still coming from my pocket. The schools were less interested in real reform than in pulling in some radical celebrity educator to make it look as if they were abreast of new ideas. That was my function; they weren't interested in my colleagues speaking. By 1976 the eight had dwindled down to three, and a year later we were back to two, when Peggy left.

[ NOTE: At this point, the original interview went into some detail about the structure and format of Growing Without Schooling, and the groundbreaking experiment it was in reader-driven publications. For those who want the full story, it has been moved in this revision to the END of this piece… ]

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

NOT EVERYTHING YOU DO GOES OUT IN THE NEWSLETTER

HOLT: No. We also handle [things] directly. We get calls from lawyers defending home schooling families taken to court, and although I'm no lawyer, I have learned a lot in this area of the Law, so I try to help. We also try to tell people about private schools which have home education assistance programs: you can register your child, for example, in the Santa Fe [NM] Community School, regardless of where you are in the country; [others are] doing similar work. In each case, home schoolers pay a small tuition fee to be enrolled officially at the school, while being educated at home.

DOES THIS PROVE SUFFICIENT FOR MOST SCHOOL BOARDS?

HOLT: It won't help if you have a local Superintendent who is determined to make trouble. If he or she ... just needs to feel that school attendance laws are being lived up to, this is usually enough to get him off your back; if he's really determined to go to the wall, though, there's not much you can do except move to another district.

DOES THIS MEAN THERE ARE NO PRECEDENTS WHICH AFFIRM THE RIGHT TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR HOME SCHOOLERS?

HOLT: Precedent is a tricky word; no court is absolutely bound by anything that went before. They're influenced by it, because they are concerned with continuity and consistency in the Law, but the only way to find out for sure what the Law says is to go to court. One reason we have so much litigation these days is because the present Supreme Court is composed of such lousy lawyers that you cannot tell from past decisions what the future ones will be, so both parties in a suit or case think they have a chance to win.

Judges like to make decisions ... sure enough of standing so that people won't bother to appeal. There is an increasing body of case-law being built up in favor of parents on this issue, and people who take the time to prepare a strong case, and who indicate that they do know the law and the precedents, seem to be having little problem. There's one case where the school board continued their appeal, and the parents have actually sued them for attempting to deprive them of their rights; it will be an important symbolic victory if they win, and a precedent I'd like to see established.

ANOTHER THING THAT'S NOTICEABLE ABOUT YOUR EFFORTS IS THE WAY YOU SCRUPULOUSLY AVOID DICTATING, PREACHING OR PASSING JUDGMENT.

HOLT: I'm very influenced by my experience working with the World Federalists in the 40s and 50s. It was a perfectly standard-American, "democratic" organization: national dues; local chapters; statewide and national conferences; formally elected delegates; policy decisions; nominations... and meetings, meetings, meetings! And of course, fundraising, to keep all the apparatus functioning. I would say that by 1952, when I left, 95 percent of their energy was being directed inward, to keep all that machinery operating, [with] only about 5 percent or less available for ... getting things done.

I only realized how much this was a part of all organizational life when I went to Larchmont, NY, in the early 50s to speak about world government at a luncheon meeting of Episcopal clergymen. After lunch four attendees offered me a ride back to the City, and I eavesdropped on one of the most fascinating conversations of my life. They were coming up to their Triennial Convention and some committee had to be formed for pre-convention deliberations.

[Meanwhile] some issue had divided them into factions, and ... someone from one faction had discovered that the majority of the names nominated from the other faction came in the first half of the alphabet. Based on the premise that if you're voting for 30, most people will have 25 by the time they get halfway down the list, this person figured that his side had no chance under normal conditions. There were letters and phone calls, flying all around the country, about whether to send the list out in alphabetical or randomized order. And all they were discussing was the selection of a committee to prepare something to bring before the convention itself! It was then that I realized how byzantine the whole thing can get...

I don't know of any way to avoid all that, except the way we do. There were some people who started calling themselves "The Growing Without Schooling of Such-And-Such", but then I realized that I didn't even want that, because it would look as if we had chapters and franchises even if we didn't, so I asked them to stop. I don't want to argue about whether a local group has good leaders, or how orthodox their ideas are. I tell people, "You want to start a group, go ahead. Have a meeting - I probably won't come to it." And I tell them, "Watch out now, you're meeting yourself to death!" But before they know it, they're cranking out mimeos notices and letters, attending constant meetings, and soon they are burnout victims.

If I've leaned something in 53 years, it's not to get into that quicksand. Practically everything I do with this organization, in fact, is based on thinking, "How would most organizations do it?" and doing the opposite ... The fact is, we're a teeny little outfit, almost broke, and we don't have the resources to do that sort of thing - even if we wanted to, which we don't. Very little money or energy here goes into internal affairs; we're an outward-looking group.

THE 'REAL PURPOSE OF SCHOOLS

ON THE GENERAL SUBJECT OF SCHOOLS, YOU'VE OFTEN SPOKEN OF THE "REAL PURPOSES" OF SCHOOLS, WHICH PREVENT THEM FROM DEVOTING TIME AND ENERGY TO THEIR AVOWED TASK OF AIDING EDUCATION. WOULD YOU SUMMARIZE THIS ARGUMENT?

HOLT: I'm just now putting together a rough outline for a book I never thought I'd be writing, about how to make schools better, and this fits right in. Schools have to do, or want to do, a lot of things other than education, and three of those functional tasks are so fundamental they really are their primary purpose - people will accept a lack of 'learning', so long as these functions are fulfilled.

The first task is custodial, getting children out of the adults' hair. It angers a lot of people just to see children, so ... schools are specifically a lockup, and a lot of folks would like them to be that way more than 30 hours a week. Indiana's compulsory schooling statutes should give libertarians an immediate cause: any police officer, and a whole range of other agents of the State, has the authority, at any time during school hours, to arrest any young person not accompanied by either a parent or a close relative. Even if another adult is there instead, he or she must have a written note from the parent granting permission. Imagine being 3, 9, 10, 12 years old, minding your own business, and encountering someone who can put you under arrest at will - you might be a visitor, or a foreigner. And from the wording it's clear what [they] had in mind: "We don't give a shit what these kids are learning, we just don't want to SEE the bastards during the daytime." That's one major function of schools, which they don't even dispute; they even talk about their "baby-sitting function"...

The second function is the grading, labeling, funneling, channeling - what Friedenburg calls "social role selection". Any society has significant differences in power, prestige, mobility, control of one's work, good slots and bad ones, etc. You've got to have ways of deciding who goes where - ways most people generally accept, because if enormous numbers of people feel they've been screwed, you're in for a real uproar. The feeling of having been cheated is a seedbed for fascism and we've got a frightening amount of it right now, and have had for 30 years or more ...

But it's still within some boundaries, because we have most people convinced of their "station in life". In the old days, if your parents were peasants you became a peasant - it was God's will. Then there was the meritocracy, where everyone rose as high as he could, limited only by personal capabilities. But you still needed street-sweepers and janitors, and they couldn't be allowed to think they'd been cheated out of the good slots.

THEY HAD TO THINK, "I'M GLAD I'M NOT AN ALPHA"...?

HOLT: No, they had to be convinced that, "I'm a Delta because I deserve to be one'." We haven't persuaded the Deltas and Epsilons to like it, but the next best thing is to make them think, "I could've been an Alpha, but I wasn't smart enough, I didn't work hard enough, and that's the way life is." ...

That's the third function of schools: the teaching of "Real Life". I wish I had a dollar for every ... defender of the schools who talks about Real Life; it's almost never the fascinating courses, or the challenging teachers - their only concern [is] that home-schooled children will miss the "social life" of schools. And when I point out that for the most part the social life of schools is mean-spirited, selfish, snobbish, conformist, ruthless, cold-hearted and often downright cruel and violent, nobody disagrees. "That's Real Life.'" they say, ... "[y]ou have to prepare children for the real world. How else are they ever going to get along with others?" Notice that they don't mean others who treat each other with kindness and dignity; they can't seem to conceive of that ...

AREN'T THEY CONFUSING CHICKEN WITH EGG? IT SEEMS A SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY TO BRING KIDS UP TO EXPECT THAT SORT OF LIFE.

HOLT: yes, and it does a lot to explain the collapse of morale in our society. There's no sense of preparing children for the excitement, the heroism, the possibilities for constructive action in Real Life; we tell them only of drudgery, routine, boredom, powerlessness and depression, as if there could be nothing else. That's the trend in education today ... and it says a lot about the loss within education of any sense of humane mission. Sixty years ago, though a lot of it was rhetoric, teachers felt they were helping children to make the world a better place than it was. Even if schools were dull, as they probably were, there was at least a humanizing leaven to it all, a sense of being engaged in humane endeavor, a sense of ...

RISING EXPECTATIONS?

HOLT: Yes, that's it. Maybe the purpose was to become richer, or make a just and peaceful world, or something entirely different. Whatever the case, they were encouraged to believe that they could have a better world, that they could help make it better, and that education was at the heart of that process. This perhaps softened the contours of what was otherwise a thoroughly totalitarian institution. But that's all gone now. Even when you show how much brighter, and more alive, home-schooled kids are, they still ask about the "social life". And when you tell them how bad that is, they just answer, "That's real life."

YOU'D THINK THAT AT LEAST THE OUTCASTS, THE VICTIMS OF ALL THIS MEAT STAMPING, WOULD REBEL AGAINST IT.

HOLT: Unfortunately, even the Epsilons are still hustling to preserve the schools that gave them that label: We saw this with the Washington, D.C. tax-credit initiative, which failed by something like ten-to-one. The system is failing these people worse than most, [yet] they still think that the worst mark on your forehead is better than no mark at all. If you're not an Epsilon, you're nothing!

SO, TO SUM UP THIS PORTION, IT'S ALL THESE NON-EDUCATIONAL FUNCTIONS WHICH PREVENT SCHOOLS FROM DOING THE TASK THEY CLAIM TO SERVE, THAT OF EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN?

HOLT: It's not just that. The school with classrooms is by its vary nature a bad model for learning. ... It's not effective, as we all must admit, and it's not efficient, either: some substantial percentage of students in a class already know the material, so it wastes their time; a similar percentage aren't even close enough to make any use of the new input. If you're talking to a class of 100, most of it is probably not useful information to more than 5 or 10 of them.

It's not just a question of where it's gone wrong, or how do we dress it up; it's more like designing a car with square wheels - if your engineering is tricky enough, and you have a complicated enough system of compensation, it will run. But it will always be a physically complicated, breakdown-lousy-no good machine, because you started from the wrong premise.

A SCHOOL THAT WORKS

GIVEN THAT THE CURRENT SCHOOLS CANNOT PROVIDE 'WHAT THEY ARE ALLEGEDLY SUPPOSED TO, WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE? HOW CAN WE ADAPT THEM TO AT LEAST NOT HINDER THE PROCESS OF REAL LEARNING?

HOLT: Well, first of all, I can name one type of school right now that is fulfilling its purpose: the ski school. There is a very practical reason for this, as my brother-in-law, who is in the ski business in Santa Fe, NM, has pointed out: Because of the terrain of mountains, any ski area has a very limited amount of beginner's slope. You want people to learn to ski in order to get then off the bunny slopes and onto the rest of the mountain, where all the real estate is; that way you can handle many times the number of skiers as will fit on the beginner's slopes.

So they have to teach skiing, in order to keep the business profitable. And as a result they've gotten better at it; with improved techniques like the Graduate Length Method people are learning - literally - in two weeks, what used to take several years. But without that incentive, in this case economic, there don't seem to be any other schools where teaching is improving.

[More to the point, though] ... schools could do what some are already doing, which is to offer themselves as a resource. They could say: "Here we are. Use us as you will. If you want your children here 30 hours a week, fine. If you want only 15 hours, that's okay, too. If you just want them to be free to come and go, use the labs and the library and other facilities as they please, that's possible, too. Tell us what you want, and we'll try to provide it, within our means."

Oddly enough, this would solve many basic problems with conventional schools. I discussed functional barriers to learning; there are also structural and philosophical ones - structural, how they're set up; philosophical, how they think about what they must do. As for structure, schools would be a lot better if: 1.) they were a lot smaller - and I mean, say, 100 students in a high school, 25 to 50 at primary and elementary levels; 2.) teachers were in complete charge of their classes - curriculum, testing, discipline, everything; and 3.) parents had the widest possible choice for their children - Schools A, B, C, etc., or no school at all.

If they didn't like what was being taught, or how, they could discuss it with the teacher, and either work something out, or find another school, or teach them themselves. If there are enough teachers around, which there certainly are today, you could find one suited to your needs and your children's; if not, hell, start your own!

The philosophical aspects, meanwhile, involve the nature of children, the nature of learning, the relationship between teaching and learning, and so forth. Today's schools, for example, don't understand authority or discipline; they fail to realize that natural authority is based on trust, respect and an awareness of another's greater competence in a given act or field. In a crack military outfit, discipline is based on pride in one's skill and work, fellowship with one's comrades, and a sense of one's important mission. These are the elements of discipline, not fear, as it is in the schools.

Hell, one reason we got out of Viet Nam was because the privates kept blowing up the lieutenants! There are always more privates than officers, and when the privates decided they'd had enough they started shooting the officers, which ended the ballgame. And when the schools start off terrorizing second-graders, they are looking for the same thing: all of a sudden the kids get bigger than the teachers, and the teacher goes out the window, followed by the desk and books, and the schools gets vandalized and burned to the ground.

But if they'd solve their structural problems they'd solve most of the discipline problems, too. They could say to the parents, "Come to us, we are a resource. Use us as much or as little as you wish!"

Of course they could also say this: "If you do come here, we set the rules. No hearings, or anything else; if you break the rules, you are gone." And Mr. X could run a strict military class if he wished, with coats and ties, and girls with skirts three inches below the knee. And if that's what you wanted, that's where you'd go; if not, there would be somewhere else, or you'd do it on your own. The street academies worked that way, with very strict order. They said, "Hey, man, if you want to come in and learn something, come on. If you want to fuck around, go out in the street and stay the hell out of here!"
That was it. Nobody had to come in, but if they did they went by the rules.

And that's how schools should be. I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on when they say, "Either you're here all the time, or not at all!" With people's taxes supporting the schools they are entitled to use then as they see fit, and to provide input on how to better serve their needs. Meanwhile, teachers who really want to be facilitators of learning could do so. Most real teachers don't want to do it in a prison camp, and they'd be a lot more likely to stay in teaching with a decent academic environment.

HOW COULD THE SCHOOLS HELP? IT WOULD SEEM THAT WITH RECENT PROPERTY TAX CUTS, HERE IN MASSACHUSETTS AND ELSEWHERE, THE PEOPLE HAVEN'T LOST ANYTHING BUT A LOT OF HEADACHES. THE SCHOOL & LIBRARY BRANCH BUILDINGS STILL STAND, EVEN IF THEY AREN'T BEING USED.

HOLT: Certainly, particularly the libraries, which are still perfectly usable. There is an attitude pervading society that all must emanate from some authority, and that it's got to be expensive. Nobody works in a library nowadays - except maybe the janitor who cleans the urinals - without a Ph.D. in Library Science. What kind of crap is this? What is there in a library ... that any half-smart person couldn't learn in a few months of working there? But it gets parlayed into a $25,000 job, and then if you can't do it for a million dollars, it can't be done.

Most of what a library is for is taking home a book or magazine for a few days. Don't spend $20 keeping track of a $2 paperback -- how about this: you put down a deposit on the first book you take out, and from thereafter you just trade books. Even if the library lost 25 percent of its books and had to replace them, which it would not, it would spend less than it does now.

I SEEM TO RECALL THIS BEING TRIED IN SOME PLACES AROUND THE COUNTRY.

HOLT: There was a woman in rural Maine a few years ago who got an old school bus for about $200, put another 200 bucks into repairs and shelving, painted "The BOOKWORM" along its side, and went around selling and lending paperback books. She might have spent $1000; when the State does this, they buy a $30,000 vehicle, put a $20K employee in it ... What she did for a thousand, they'd spend a hundred times as much for.

Part of the problem is, people think if it's not expensive, it can't be any good. The British and Scandinavians have had great success with what they call "Adventure Playgrounds". They take a piece of unused land, put a high fence around it for privacy, fill it with junk - old boards, tires, rope, wooden boxes - add some hammers and saws, maybe a wrecking bar. And they put a high school or college kid in there who knows something about tools, and let the kids go at it. They build stuff, and tear it apart, and have a hell of a time. The cost is practically zero, and the kids love it.

You can't do that in an American city; they want something designed by an architect that costs a million dollars, and they call you a racist if you try to do less. Back a few years ago some colleagues set one up in Charlestown (MA); the local kids really enjoyed it, but the City closed it down. Meanwhile, in those sterile, overpriced playgrounds the city puts up, the kids have nothing to do but look at them.

ON LEARNING DISABILITIES

HOW ABOUT THE LEARNING DISABILITIES QUESTION? YOU'VE CERTAINLY INCURRED THE WRATH OF THE "EDUCATIONIST" ESTABLISHMENT FOR YOUR CHALLENGES TO THE ORTHODOXY OF THEIR VIEWS.

HOLT: First of all, anybody trying to learn something has difficulties, but there is a semantic, or epistemological, line between a learning difficulty and a serious disability, and so far nobody in the field has defined just where that line is to be drawn, even with vague precision. Second, there is a difference between using a term like "learning disability" to refer to an observed symptom of behavior, and using it to infer a cause for that behavior; once again, people use the term to describe either situation interchangeably. Such distinctions are absolutely clear in medicine: fever, diarrhea, body-ache - these are observable symptoms, from which the physician makes a diagnosis. The failure to build into a discussion some context to indicate which aspect is under consideration is a philosophical sloppiness, indicating ... such a low level of competence that ... everything must be questioned that they have to say.

To sustain a claim [of cause-effect] in medicine you must first show that where observed symptom A is present, disease B is, too, and where one is not, neither is the other. You can take someone with scurvy, find a lack of Vitamin C, treat with vitamin C, and find the scurvy is gone. You can also draw a pretty clear line between who has the condition and who doesn't. And when you do define and isolate the condition, it must be something that is generally rare - otherwise it's not a disease by any known definition. You don't call it a 'disease' when people pant after climbing a few flights of stairs, because other than a handful of Olympic athletes and marathoners, the whole human race exhibits this behavior, and a 'disease' that afflicts over 80 percent of the population is meaningless.

If you can't do all these things you haven't isolated the condition. This is the philosophical basis behind the scientific process itself; you can be talking about astronomy or physics or psychology, but you have to be able to make these elementary distinctions. But the Learning Disabilities categories seem without boundaries - one article the National Education Association published lists enough symptoms to catch every fish in the ocean if strictly applied.

And they don't even agree about the cause. Now they are saying that dyslexic people have different brainwave patterns. But does this mean that, given a large sample of people diagnosed as dyslexic, they'll all have this abnormal brainwave? Have they found this only in those diagnosed as dyslexic [by testing] allegedly "normal" people for the pattern? Finally, could we take a random population sample and, on the sole basis of these brainwave tests, predict with some accuracy who will and who will not exhibit dyslexia? This still wouldn't prove anything, but at least it would indicate a willingness to do some scientific research on the subject.

IT SEEMS THAT THE EXPERTS HAVE BEEN MORE WILLING TO JUMP AT THE FIRST ANSWER THAN TO EXPLORE DEEPER...

HOLT: It's more than that. The physiological answers are very useful to a lot of people, in different ways. Upper-class affluent parents (Poor people just get called "stupid", because their parents can't afford all the fancy treatment!) can say, "Our children will always be failures, but at least we'll know it's not our fault."' Meanwhile, the kids grow up feeling, "I may be weird, but at least I'm not stupid", the school buys the idea that they can't do an/thing about it, and the experts get what they always wanted: a permanent client.

WHAT IS YOUR OWN THEORY ABOUT THE CAUSE OF LEARNING DISABILITIES?

HOLT: I think stress produces a lot of the observed symptoms which are declared to be disabilities. There is experimental evidence of this, though you'd hardly know it from the experts. I spoke before a group of 1100 Learning Disabilities people in Montreal a few years ago and reviewed the evidence of [stress-related ailments, ranging] from short-term amnesia to blindness, loss of speech and hearing, and even physical paralysis; the experiences of war alone give us ample evidence.

So I asked, "How many of you have ever HEARD of research being done on this subject, correlating stress or anxiety with perceptual handicaps - however measured and defined?" Two hands were raised: one man spoke of the well-known but lightly regarded work of a maverick educator named von Hillesheim many years ago; the other did not speak. Later he wrote me to tell me why:

As a professor at McGill University, right there in Montreal, he had done just this sort of research with a group of young boys diagnosed as dyslexic, maybe six or eight years before. He took them from a local school and - in less than six months of stress-reduced learning environment - they improved to the point where most of their teachers were willing to say that they were "no longer learning-disabled"! He had published the results, and the matter was dropped, because nobody wanted to consider the issue that way.

These situations are not at all uncommon, and the body of case-histories is extensive, but almost nobody seems to know anything about it. This assumes they were all telling the truth, of course; it's also possible that they were afraid to speak out. Either way, it's a verboten idea: If you say the unpopular thing in academia or the sciences these days, you risk your job, your tenure, your funding... everything! It's amazing how much science has become like the Church in Galileo's time...

To sum up, the Learning Disabilities people are bad scientists, bad thinkers and bad philosophers. I'll meet them on their own ground; they just don't do good science.

POPULAR WISDOM DEBUNKED

BACK TO THE HOME SCHOOLING ISSUE. LET'S DEAL WITH A FEW CHARGES AGAINST THE IDEA FROM ITS CRITICS. FIRST, ISN'T IT TRUE THAT HOME SCHOOLING IS, AS YOU HAVE SAID OF LEARNING DISABILITIES, A PROVINCE OF THE RICH?

HOLT: No, that's not true. Working-class people - who get their hands dirty on the job - are educating their own children; so are welfare mothers. Nothing in this activity necessarily excludes people from any social or economic class. It takes courage, and resolution, and confidence; it takes qualities of character to do it. But these are not things you get from school or college, or from any particular economic or social conditions. It is probably somewhat harder for poor people to do home schooling than for rich people, but then ANYTHING is harder to do if you are poor!

ANOTHER CRITICISM RELATES TO THE "REAL LIFE" QUESTION: HOW HAVE HOME SCHOOLS MANAGED TO COPE WITH THE COLD, CRUEL WORLD, WHICH, FOR WHATEVER REASON, IT CERTAINLY HAS BECOME IN MANY WAYS?

HOLT: I'm glad you asked that, because recently I've seen some very good signs. Julia Van Dam is an 11-year-old, home schooled since second-grade, from Providence, RI; she and her family were on the Donahue Show with me recently, and are pictured on the cover of "Teach Your Own". This fall she decided to go back to school, just for the experience, and she chose one of the most rigid, traditional, strict girls' schools in the East. And she's enjoying it, doesn't regret the loss of freedom, or think of it as a wasted year. As an outstanding student and an exceptional reader, she's been able to adjust to the differences in subject matter. There are a few schoolyard games she's still learning, out it's been a smooth transition.

The only thing she has had to do that took real adjustment was coping with the idea of doing less than her best all the time. Like most traditional schools, this one gives more work than a student can do well, so Julia is having to learn to "satisfice" - that is, do enough to get by in some cases, instead of always trying to do it all perfectly. She's learning to settle for something less in her performance, which is, I suppose, a survival skill of sorts, too: often there is just too much in life to do it all to perfection.

Laurie Trombley is an even more striking example. Her family was featured in the Time article a few years ago. The Trombleys are basically a working-class family from Connecticut, although the father is a skilled technician, he works with his hands - he's not a pencil-pushing order-giver - and they just don't have the money to send their kids to college. So Laurie applied for and received an ROTC scholarship, and part of her preparation was to go through Basic Training - not just a cut down version, but the full-tilt, belly-crawling, grenade-throwing, 20-miles-with-full-pack gauntlet of endurance, with all the spit-and-polish of the military.

And she knocked 'em dead! Medals for Marksmanship, Grenade-Throwing, Outstanding Cadet ... There was a program which took the two dozen or so outstanding cadets in the country to Germany - she's there now. And the interesting thing is, not only did she do well, but she enjoyed the experience, as an interesting challenge. She even sprained an ankle during the early going, then re-sprained it two or three times later. They offered to let her drop out and finish up next year, but she hung on, and still managed to finish at the top of her class.

It all seems to bear out the old idea of how the best preparation for a bad or difficult situation is a good experience. Laurie and Julia have so much in the bank in terms of confidence and curiosity about the world that each has been able to deal with what is for most people a very difficult undertaking. I've quoted John Masefield in a recent issue of GWS: "The days that make us happy make us wise..." You could add to that, "and make us strong" ...

WHAT ABOUT THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS? ALTHOUGH LIBERTARIANS MIGHT REJOICE IN THE PROSPECT, THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE VIEW HOME SCHOOLING AS A STEP TOWARD THROWING POOR KIDS INTO THE STREETS AS THE PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS CLOSE DOWN.

HOLT: Home schooling is not in any foreseeable future going to be the slightest threat to the existence of public schools. If they collapse it will be because of other kinds of pressures entirely. In their list of clear and present dangers, we rank just below the San Andreas Fault, I think.

THE LIBERTARIAN ANGLE

IF THAT'S SO, THEN WHY SHOULD LIBERTARIANS, WHO DO SEEK TO PHASE OUT GOVERNMENT-RUN EDUCATION, SUPPORT HOME SCHOOLING, WHICH HAS LITTLE EFFECT IN THAT FIGHT?

HOLT: Looked at that way, I guess I should oppose tuition tax-credits, because it has the potential of diverting energy away from what I consider a more lasting solution to what's wrong with schools. But the larger issue is that of children's rights. I did a lot of talking about this in "Escape From Childhood", though I try to avoid being sucked into these discussions now; it's not a live political issue, and not on any political agenda before the general public...

EXCEPT FOR THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY'S...

HOLT: Yes, and I'm glad you've made that statement, though we might as well not fool ourselves that in the next decade we'll see this become a pivotal debate issue in the state legislatures. But what I said at the end of "Escape From Childhood" was this: People who feel their children are full human beings and ought to be treated that way should try, within the geographical boundaries of their community, say, to set up a sort of invisible network, in which adults can treat children as we hope all adults will someday treat them. I think of what Paul Goodman used to say to radicals: "Suppose the revolution was over and you had won - how would you live your life then? Well, live it that way now!"

It seems to me that libertarians are talking about the same thing. A libertarian school would not be a petty-fascist one, but one based on the freedom of inquiry. I don't see how libertarians could support a school with a fixed curriculum; rather, they ought to be interested in school environments where the schools are resources for free people to do free learning. One thing I see the Libertarians doing, other than just running candidates, is helping to create alternative institutions where people can experience freedom and dignity. And it seems to me that GWS and the home schooling movement are very much a working out of this idea.

Mind you, I realize there are people in our movement from ... the Far light and the Far Left, ... authoritarian, Fundamentalist Christian parents, and some who are actual child-beaters - and I'd get rid of [those] if I knew how. But most parents in our network respect and trust children, give them access to their own lives, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of chances to do real work. That seems to me a lot more worthwhile than making small changes in the kinds of oppression we inflict on children by moving from public to private schools.

SO YOU FEEL THAT HOME SCHOOLING & CONVENTIONAL SCHOOLS CAN PEACEABLY COEXIST, PROVIDED THERE'S SOME TOLERANCE FROM THE ESTABLISHED SECTORS?

HOLT: The last chapter of the new book is a discussion of why it would be to the advantage of the public schools to cooperate with home-schooled families. Many people are perfectly willing to enroll their children in public schools so the schools can continue getting state aid - it's surprising how many public schools have turned down that offer!
And most families would be perfectly happy with some cooperative relationship, so long as it doesn't mean some public school administrator telling them how to educate their Kids. Within the home school movement, of course, there are a significant number who want Government out of education completely, but on the whole that's not high on most agendas - it's not that high on mine, though I'd certainly like to see it happen; at least with private schools there may be some measure of control over how they handle things.

That really isn't to the point of what we're all doing, however. As I said, I used to get dragged into arguments over "What's wrong with the schools?" all the time, but no longer. Now I say, "If you are happy with the way things are in the schools, and your children are happy and fulfilled, fine. I'm glad you are happy, and that the schools are doing what you want them to for you. But there are lots of people out there who are very unhappy, and it's to those people that I'm offering this other choice, and saying that they don't have to just accept what's imposed on them. It takes a lot of determination, and some hard work, but you can teach your own!"

Appendix:

Growing Without Schooling - A History:

NOTE: This segment was initially at the front of the interview, since at the time this newsletter was blazing new territory in making a periodical into a truly community venture. Twenty-plus years later, it is mainly reprinted for historical reference.

HOW DID THE MAGAZINE, GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING. BEGIN?

HOLT: It originated from the demise of The New Schools Exchange Newsletter, a valuable medium of communication for alternate and free schools information, until it folded in 1976. Since I was interested in alternative schools - almost as much as in people teaching their own kids - I considered taking it over. We'd already been producing a lot of low-cost literature (believing in the value of the cheap printed word) and making reprints of my articles and papers, including a homemade version of [Holt's out-of-print book] "Escape From Childhood", which we xerox-reduced, cut and pasted into a pamphlet. [ NOTE: These may or may not still be available. Try < http://www.fun-books.com/ > or write Pinchpenny Press, c/o Holt Associates, PO Box 89, Wakefield, MA 01880-5011. ]

Anyway, I thought of renaming [the publication] The New/No Schools Exchange Newsletter. I also considered Growing Up Smart Without Schooling, the title I planned for the sequel to "Instead of Education", although that was to be more life-stories of adults who had spent most of their growing up other than in school, as well as case-histories of people doing without school now. ... I decided I didn't really want to get involved with the politics of alternative schools; what really interested me was people teaching their kids at home.

And the title Growing Without Schooling seemed just right, since "growing" can be interpreted in so many ways. The first issue went out in the fall of '77 - four pages, typed in the office, xerox-reduced and pasted up. About 200 people signed up, and it has grown so that we now have over 3000 subscribers around the world.

I'VE NOTICED THAT A LARGE PROPORTION OF GWS IS DEVOTED TO LETTERS FROM SUBSCRIBERS.

HOLT: That was part of the design from the beginning. I always felt the "Letters" page was the best part of any magazine, and needed more space. Except for [the short-lived] Harper's Weekly, we're the first I know of to try this. We've had to expand from four pages to 24, just because of all the letters we get, and we don't use nearly all of them. I had planned on 8 pages, at most 12, but we get so much good information and I hate to waste it.

There are two other innovations we've made; the second is the group subscription, which I've never seen anywhere else. I don't see why libertarian magazines don't consider this: the largest expense in publication sales is in office procedure - the check, the acknowledgement, mailing lists, and all that; if you send out more than one copy to the same address, the cost is the marginal cost of printing another copy. With GWS, if people buy one subscription they can get others sent to the same address for a few dollars each.

We even have a few people in England and New Zealand taking group-subs for 40 or 50 copies; and one group in North Carolina takes 33 every issue and distributes them themselves. I'd say that between a third and a half of those who get the magazine are part of a group subscription.

YOU SEEM TO ATTRACT WRITERS FROM ALL OVER, INCLUDING A LOT WHO PR0BABLY THOUGHT THEY COULD NEVER WRITE ANYTHING OF IMPORTANCE.

HOLT: The reason they write so well is because they are dealing with something they really care about. And it comes out strong, fresh and hot. They're not afraid to reveal themselves, either - that's the third innovation we've made: the directory. It's not a full list of subscribers, only those who have asked that their names and addresses be listed (often along with the names and ages of their children) as a signal for others [to] get in touch ...

We also have a list in the back of the magazine, rather small so far, of what we call "cooperative school districts". We only list places where relations between school boards and parents are extremely comfortable, and everyone is aware of the risks ... [Other] areas ... can and do support a number of home-school families - so long as it doesn't become a matter of public record. If they were exposed, their energies would be diverted to defending themselves. Some day I hope our list will be much longer, so that people can actually consider moving to a nearby district to find cooperative school officials. Some of this happens now, informally, by word of mouth.

Ultimately, we'd like to list [friends of home schooling] from all fields: doctors, professors of education, teachers willing to "tutor", certified teachers who could align themselves as cooperating supervising advisors, and so on. What you have to remember is this, however: GWS is just the tip of the iceberg; there's a lot more on local levels than we even know about, let alone publish.

I NOTICE THAT ALTHOUGH YOU AND YOUR STAFF DO WRITE SOME OF THE MATERIAL YOURSELF, GWS IS NOT DIVIDED INTO "LETTERS" AND EDITORIAL COPY, LIKE MOST MAGAZINES.

HOLT: Right. Only the 'jh' or 'dr' [for Donna R ] tells you it's ours. The wall between readers and those who out the magazine together just doesn't make sense; eliminating it allows [people] to read it like a group letter from a bunch of friends, not some pronouncement from on high. I'm very proud of this magazine, and in some ways it's even more mine than my books.

I ALSO NOTED THE RAPID RESPONSE-TIME FOR LETTER FEEDBACK.

HOLT: One of the reasons I started the magazine was to speed up the communication cycle between myself and my readers. When I was writing only books, I got a lot of letters, many of which would someday become another book, but in a very slow cycle: I'd write down an idea; two years later it might see print; a year later someone wrote back ... By the time that got into another book it might be five years since the original concept. Here, if I have something I really want to say it's out within two months at most, with responses starting a few weeks later.

I think it's a marvelous magazine, and it means a great deal to those who get it, because they feel the isolation of having taken their kids out of the local schools. With GWS they don't have to feel that way, because every issue there are dozens if people in the same situation. I get hundreds of letters saying, "We'd never have had the courage to do it if it wasn't for Growing Without Schooling...

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