Holt/Teach Your Own
I am usually challenged by someone who pronounces, “But you need to know trigonometry! You need to know this in order to be a literate person in today’s complicated, technological society.” Society is complicated and increasingly technological, but many of us will have to admit that learning trigonometry or calculus in school was not a prerequisite for learning how to use computers as adults.
Therefore, it’s very easy to duplicate conventional schooling at home. After all, we know what school is like from our own experiences as students, perhaps even as teachers, and when we homeschool our own kids, that word “school” connects it all for us. In response to the prevailing definition of the word “school,” John created the word “unschooling” to describe how we help children learn without duplicating ideas and practices that we learned in school.
She believed that no teacher could ever teach anyone anything. Her task as a teacher was to create an environment in which the student can learn. Knowledge . . . is not to be forced on anyone. The brain has to be receptive, malleable, and most important, hungry for that knowledge.
There seems to me a suggestion—forgive me if I’m wrong about this—that in learning about the world, other people’s books are more important than observation. With this view I most emphatically and strongly disagree. This is indeed part of what I am trying to tell teachers—that the things they learn or feel they are learning from their direct contact with and observation of children are more important and what is even more important more to be trusted than what the theoreticians may tell them. This is a heretical view, I know, but it is my own.3
Since compulsory school attendance laws force teachers to do police work and so prevent them from doing real teaching, it would be in their best interests, as well as those of parents and children, to have those laws repealed, or at least greatly modified. In the article, I suggested some political steps or stages
People also talked to me with great enthusiasm about innovative programs. But these were always paid for with federal money, and as time went on, it always turned out that when the federal money stopped, so did the program. People might feel badly about losing these wonderful programs. But pay for them with local money, their own money? It was never considered.
Of the very few who were, most were doing so not because they believed that children really wanted and could be trusted to find out about the world, but because they thought that giving children some of the appearances of freedom (allowing them to wear old clothes, run around, shout, write on the wall, etc.) was a clever way of getting them to do what the school had wanted all along—to learn those school subjects, get into a good college, etc. Freedom was not a serious way of living and working, but only a trick, a “motivational device.” When it did not quickly bring the wanted results, the educators gave it up without a thought and without regret.
Of the very few who were, most were doing so not because they believed that children really wanted and could be trusted to find out about the world, but because they thought that giving children some of the appearances of freedom (allowing them to wear old clothes, run around, shout, write on the wall, etc.) was a clever way of getting them to do what the school had wanted all along—to learn those school subjects, get into a good college, etc. Freedom was not a serious way of living and working, but only a trick, a “motivational device.” When it did not quickly bring the wanted results, the educators gave it up without a thought and without regret.
What they want their child to learn is how to work. By that they don’t mean to do good and skillful work they can be proud of. They don’t have that kind of work themselves, and never expect to. They don’t even call that “work.” They want their children, when their time comes, to be able, and willing, to hold down full-time painful jobs of their own. The best way to get them ready to do this is to make school as much like a fulltime painful job as possible.
She told me how much he enjoyed my class, and how much he talked about all the interesting things that went on in it. Then she paused a while, frowning a little, and finally said, “But you know, his father and I worry a little about how much fun he is having in school. After all, he is going to have to spend the rest of his life doing things he doesn’t like, and he may as well get used to it now.”
Were schools, however organized, however run, necessary at all? Were they the best place for learning? Were they even a good place? Except for people learning a few specialized skills, I began to doubt that they were. Most of what I knew, I had not learned in school, or in any other such school-like “learning environments” or “learning experiences” as meetings, workshops, and seminars. I suspected this was true of most people.
Do vigorous, healthy, active, creative, inventive societies—Periclean Greece, Elizabethan England, the United States after the Revolution—spend so much time talking about learning? No; people are too busy doing things, and learning from what they do.
A well-publicized study by Harvard University found that both children’s literacy and school success could be linked to pleasant dinner table conversation about current events. In addition, Blake Bowden, a researcher at Children’s Hospital Medical Center of Cincinnati, “conducted a study to see what protects teenagers against maladjustive behaviors. The answer: sitting down to a meal with a parent at least five times a week.” It isn’t necessary to take children out of school to eat meals together, but doing so can make it easier to achieve, since long breakfasts, picnic lunches, breaks for a snack together, and in-depth nonmealtime conversations can become options for homeschoolers who are too busy during dinnertime.
Perhaps it is for the same reason my wife and I decided to homeschool: We didn’t want our children to waste their time in the same empty rituals of education that we did: passing tests only to forget the subject matter when the grades were given; spending years with passing grades in foreign-language instruction yet being unable to have even a rudimentary conversation in the language outside of the classroom; struggling to learn advanced math skills that were seldom used outside of class; doing lab experiments that were more rote exercises than scientific inquiries. Time and youth cannot be regained, so perhaps, ultimately, the real crisis in education may be one of disillusionment among graduates rather than poor performance among current students.
One reason that so few schools are any good at their work is that they are not serious. “Good” schools and “bad,” private and public, with only a few exceptions have always run under the rule that when learning happens, the school takes the credit, and when it doesn’t, the students get the blame. Where in earlier times the schools might have said that some kids were bad, stupid, lazy, or crazy, now they say they have mysterious diseases like “minimal brain dysfunction” or “learning disabilities.” Under whatever name, these remain what they always were—excuses
Some kinds of community gathering places and activities might help us form this social glue. But not schools—not as long as they also have the job of sorting out the young into winners and losers, and preparing the losers for a lifetime of losing. These two jobs can’t be done in the same place at the same time.
John L. clutched a strap to keep from falling, but said nothing. As the young man went to the back of the car, John L.’s friend said to him, “Are you going to let him get away with that?” John L. shrugged and said, “Oh, I don’t see why not.” His friend became very indignant. “You’re the heavyweight champion of the world,” he said furiously. “You don’t have to be so damned polite.” To which John L. replied, “The heavyweight champion of the world can afford to be polite.”
One of the main differences between a free country and a police state, I always thought, was that in a free country, as long as you obeyed the law, you could believe whatever you liked. Your beliefs were none of the government’s business. Far less was it any of the government’s business to say that one set of ideas was good and another set bad, or that schools should promote the good and stamp out the bad. Have we given up these principles? And if we haven’t, do we really want to? Suppose we decided to give the government the power, through compulsory schools, to promote good ideas and put down bad. To whom would we then give the power to decide which ideas were good and which bad? To legislatures? To state boards of education? To local school boards?
One of the reasons why growing numbers of people are so passionately opposed to the public schools is that these schools are in fact acting as if someone had explicitly and legally given them the power to promote one set of ideas and to put down others. A fairly small group of people, educational bureaucrats at the state and federal level, who largely control what schools say and do, are more and more using the schools to promote whatever ideas they happen to think will be good for the children, or the country.
If there were no other reason for wanting to keep kids out of school, the social life would be reason enough. In all but a very few of the schools I have taught in, visited, or know anything about, the social life of the children is mean-spirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, snobbish, full of talk about who went to whose birthday party and who got what Christmas presents and who got how many Valentine cards and who is talking to so-and-so and who is not. Even in the first grade, classes soon divide up into leaders (energetic and—often deservedly—popular kids), their bands of followers, and other outsiders who are pointedly excluded from these groups.
For a long, long time, people who were good at sharing what they knew have realized certain things: (1) to help people learn something, you must first understand what they already know; (2) showing people how to do something is better than telling them, and letting them do it themselves is best of all; (3) you mustn’t tell or show too much at once, since people digest new ideas slowly and must feel secure with new skills or knowledge before they are ready for more; (4) you must give people as much time as they want and need to absorb what you have shown or told them; (5) instead of testing their understanding with questions you must let them show how much or little they understand by the questions they ask you; (6) you must not get impatient or angry when people don’t understand; (7) scaring people only blocks learning, and so on. These are clearly not things that one has to spend three years talking about.
A homeschooling mother wrote me that when, simply out of fear of the schools, she began to give her children a lot of conventional schoolwork, they said, “Look, Mom, if we’re going to have to spend all our time doing this school junk, we’d rather do it in school.” Quite right. If you are going to have to spend your days doing busywork to relieve adult anxieties, better do it in school, where you only have one-thirtieth of the teacher’s anxieties, rather than at home, where you have all of your parent’s.
But it is important that you learn. In the first place, if you don’t, and the schools find out, there is no way in the world that they or the courts are going to allow you to teach your children at home. In the second place, if you don’t know how to read and write, your children are likely to feel that reading and writing are not useful and interesting, or else that they are very difficult, neither of which is true. So learning to read and write will have to be one of your first tasks.”
Anyway, children don’t need, don’t want, and couldn’t stand six hours of teaching a day, even if parents wanted to do that much. To help them find out about the world doesn’t take that much adult input. Most of what they need, parents have been giving them since they were born. As I have said, they need access. They need a chance, sometimes, for honest, serious, unhurried talk; or sometimes, for joking, play, and foolishness; or sometimes, for tenderness, sympathy, and comfort. They need, much of the time, to share your life, or at least, not to feel shut out of it, in short, to go some of the places you go, see and do some of the things that interest you, get to know some of your friends, find out what you did when you were little and before they were born. They need to have their questions answered, or at least heard and attended to—if you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” They need to know more and more adults whose main work in life is not taking care of kids. They need some friends their own age, but not dozens of them; two or three, at most half a dozen, is as many real friends as any child can have at one time. Perhaps above all, they need a lot of privacy, solitude, calm, times when there’s nothing to do.
Beyond that, you may expect too much of yourself. Your children’s learning is not all going to come from you, but from them, and their interaction with the world around them, which of course includes you. You do not have to know everything they want to know, or be interested in everything they are interested in. As for patience, maybe you won’t have enough at first; like many hometeaching parents, you may start by trying to do too much, know too much, control too much. But like the rest, you will learn from experience—mostly, to trust your children.
People don’t change their ideas, much less their lives, because someone comes along with a clever argument to show that they’re wrong. As a way of making real and deep changes in society, this shouting and arguing is mostly a waste of time.
These qualities themselves can multiply. Though many unschoolers may not think of themselves this way, they are in the truest sense leaders. Leaders are not what many people think—people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly.
This has already happened in the law, as in many other fields. Abraham Lincoln, and many others, did not learn law by going to law school, but by reading law books. Until recently people used to speak, not of “studying” law, but of “reading the law.” (In England, studying law is still called “reading law.”) It was always possible for poor boys (more rarely girls) to become lawyers by reading the law, and then working in law offices, doing lowly jobs at first, but learning more and being given more responsibility as they learned, and perhaps in the long run setting up their own law offices. No doubt even then the sons of the rich had a big advantage. But the poor at least had a way in. Not anymore. In many or most states, you can’t practice law or even take the bar exams unless you have been to law school—and there are many more people trying to get into law school than there are places for them. Beyond this, the “good” jobs
I tend to agree with Harrison Salisbury that Hiram, though perhaps not an unusual man in his time, would be a most unusual one in ours, far more knowing, skillful, intelligent, resourceful, adaptive, inventive, and competent than most people we would find today, in either city or country, and no matter how schooled. But the real question I want to raise and answer is how Hiram learned all those skills. To be sure, he did not learn them in school, nor in workshops or any other school-like activity. Almost certainly, he learned how to do all those kinds of work, many of them highly skilled, by being around when other people were doing them. But these people were not doing the work in order to teach Hiram something. Nobody raised a barn just so that Hiram could see how barns were raised. They raised it because they needed the barn. Nor did they say to him, “Hiram, as long as I have to raise this barn, you may as well come around and learn how it is done.” They said, “Hiram, I’m raising a barn and I need your help.” He was there to help, not to learn—but as he helped, he learned.
I tend to agree with Harrison Salisbury that Hiram, though perhaps not an unusual man in his time, would be a most unusual one in ours, far more knowing, skillful, intelligent, resourceful, adaptive, inventive, and competent than most people we would find today, in either city or country, and no matter how schooled.
Almost a century later John Dewey was to talk about “learning by doing.” The way for young people to learn (for example) how pottery is made is not to read about it but to make pots. No argument about that. But making pots in school just to learn how it is done is still nowhere near as good as making pots (and learning from it) because someone needs the pots. The best incentive to learn how to do good work, and to do it, is to know that
As Liedloff shows, children so reared very quickly notice what people are doing around them, and want to join in and take part as soon and as far as their powers permit. No one has to do anything in order to “socialize” the children, or make them take part in the life of the group. They are born social, it is their nature. One of the most peculiar destructive ideas that “civilized” people have ever invented is that children are born bad and must be threatened and punished into doing what everyone around them does.
What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out. Finding ways to do all this is not easy. The modern world is dangerous, confusing, not meant for children, not generally kind or welcoming to them. We have much to learn about how to make the world more accessible to them, and how to give them more freedom and competence in exploring it. But this is a very different thing from designing nice little curricula.
The difference between learning in and from real life and learning in schools is perhaps most important of all in speech and language. Ivan Illich writes about this in “Vernacular Values and Education,” in his book Shadow Work. In most cultures, we know that speech resulted from conversation embedded in everyday life, from listening to fights and lullabies, gossip, stories, and dreams. Even today, the majority of people in poor countries learn all their language skills without any paid tutorship, without any attempt whatsoever to teach them how to speak. Illich goes on to point out that all over the world many
I first met Ivan Illich in the midnineties and have had the good fortune to spend time in his company since. More than once, I heard Ivan say how much he learned as a young boy simply by sitting under his grandparents’ table in their house in Vienna, listening to their conversations. We can’t measure such informal learning, but as these stories indicate, people do learn important things about and in the world differently than they can in a conventional school classroom.
The film is important for unschoolers for many reasons, among them this one. What we need in our communities is not so much schools as a variety of protected, safe, interesting spaces where children can gather, meet and make friends, and do things together. Such spaces might include children’s libraries (or sections of libraries), children’s museums (a wonderful one in Boston), children’s theaters (children making the drama, not just watching it), children’s (or children’s and adults’) arts or craft centers, adventure playgrounds, and so on. One such space was the Peckham Center. Another such space could be something like the Ny Lille Skole. It’s not a matter of copying it exactly, but of catching the spirit of it.
The gist of it (and there may well be many books like it) was that if we, i.e., people who work in schools, paid enough attention to the fantasy lives of children, we could learn to understand them and bend them to our own purposes. This would be a great mistake and a great wrong. Instead, we should be content to watch and enjoy as much of children’s fantasy lives as they will let us see, and to take part in them, if the children ask us to and if we can do so happily and unselfconsciously. Otherwise, we should leave them alone. Children’s fantasy is useful and important to them for many reasons, but above all because it is theirs, the one part of their lives which is wholly under their control. We must resist the temptation to make it ours.
Children should be able to do them, not just in what little tag ends of time remain after all the “important” work is done, but when they are most full of energy and enthusiasm. We talk these days of “quality time.” Children need quality time for their fantasy and play as much as for their reading or math. They need to play well as much as they need to read well. Indeed, we would probably find if we looked into it that children who are not good at playing, dreaming, fantasizing, are usually not much good at reading either.
wrote How Children Learn hoping to help introduce the natural, effortless, and effective ways of learning of the happy home into the schools. At times I fear I may only have helped to bring the strained, self-conscious, painful, and ineffective ways of learning of the schools into the home. To parents I say, above all else, don’t let your home become some terrible miniature copy of the school. No lesson plans! No quizzes! No tests! No report cards! Even leaving your children alone would be better; at least they could figure out some things on their own. Live together, as well as you can; enjoy life together, as much as you can. Ask questions to find out something about the world itself, not to find out whether or not someone knows it.
On the basis of much experience, Bateson says this is true of all creatures, and I agree. The elephant in the jungle is smarter than the elephant waltzing in the circus. The sea lion in the sea is smarter than the sea lion playing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” on some instrument. The rat eating garbage in the slums is smarter than the rat running mazes in the psychology lab. The crawling baby, touching, handling, tasting everything it can reach, is smarter than the baby learning, because it pleases his mother, to touch his nose when she shows him a card with NOSE written on it.
The most important question any thinking creature can ask itself is, “What is worth thinking about?” When we deny its right to decide that for itself, when we try to control what it must attend to and think about, we make it less observant, resourceful, and adaptive, in a word, less intelligent, in a blunter word, more stupid. This may be the place to answer a question that by now many people have asked me: what do I think of baby training books—teach your baby this, teach your baby that, make your baby a genius. I am against them. The tricks they tell parents to teach their babies to do are not necessary, not very helpful, and if continued very long, probably very harmful. The trouble with teaching babies tricks, even the trick of reading, is that the more we do this, the more they think that learning means and can only mean being taught by others to do tricks, and the less they want to or can explore and make sense of the world around them in their own ways and for their own reasons. I don’t doubt for a second that the experts in teaching babies tricks can indeed teach them an impressive variety of tricks while they are still quite young.
Intelligence, as I wrote in How Children Fail, is not the measure of how much we know how to do, but of how we behave when we don’t know what to do. It has to do with our ability to think up important questions and then to find ways to get useful answers. This ability is not a trick that can be taught, nor does it need to be. We are born with it, and if our other deep animal needs are fairly well satisfied, and we have reasonable access to the world around us, we will put it to work on that world.
We are not walking copying machines. When we try to draw a chair, we do not “copy” it. We look at it a while, and then “tell” our hand to draw, say, a vertical line of a certain height. Then we look at the chair again, then back at the paper, then “tell” our hand to go halfway up the vertical line, and from that point draw a line of a certain length in a certain direction. Then we look back at the chair for more instructions. If, like trained artists, we are good at turning what we see into instructions for our hand, we will produce a good likeness of the chair. If, like most of us, we are not good at it, we will not.
What I almost always talked about was the difference between jobs, careers, and work. A job, I said, was something that you did for money, something that someone else told you to do and paid you for doing, something you would probably not have done otherwise, but did only to get the money. A career was a kind of ladder of jobs. If you did your first job for a while, made no mistakes and caused no trouble, whoever gave you that job might give you a new job, better paid, maybe slightly more interesting, or at least not so hard-dirty-dangerous. Then, if you did that job okay for a while, your boss might then give you a slightly better job, and so on. This adds up to what is called “a career.”
What I almost always talked about was the difference between jobs, careers, and work. A job, I said, was something that you did for money, something that someone else told you to do and paid you for doing, something you would probably not have done otherwise, but did only to get the money. A career was a kind of ladder of jobs. If you did your first job for a while, made no mistakes and caused no trouble, whoever gave you that job might give you a new job, better paid, maybe slightly more interesting, or at least not so hard-dirty-dangerous. Then, if you did that job okay for a while, your boss might then give you a slightly better job, and so on. This adds up to what is called “a career.”
Charter schools, distance learning, and all sorts of for-profit tutoring and education services are blurring the line between home and school, on-campus credits and off-campus credits, service learning, and community service. The positive side of this is the multitude of flexible options these services can provide to homeschoolers. The negative side is that many of these options are beholden to schoolish ideas of when, what, and how children should learn. Lists and schedules of what and when to learn already dominate our schools, and the more we allow regulators to pressure our homes into being like schools—following the same lists and schedules for learning, being evaluated and held responsible in the same way—the less likely we are to try something different than what the law, or school regulations, dictates for our children. One of the great legal issues homeschooling will face in the coming century will be the ability of homeschooling to remain distinct and well protected from other forms of private and public education, not only for the sanctity of family and personal privacy, but so that an option will always remain for teachers and students in school, too: the option to “unschool,” not to be like a school at all in their approach to learning.
As Holt puts it, “I see no point in confronting the authorities directly if you can dodge them.” When dodging no longer is an option, then appealing to state legislators is often better than going to court. Holt’s legislative statement and his description of the hearing, which follow, are models of how such action can work for homeschoolers.
Subsequent decisions in state courts, in Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Iowa, among others, have held that this right of parents to control the education of their children includes the right to teach them themselves. In at least one state the courts have held that the burden of proof is not on such parents to show that they are capable of teaching their children, but on the state to show that they are not capable of doing so.
follows that when the states say that a given educational program, whether of parents or of a private school, is inadequate, it must be from this point of view and this one only. The courts have never said, for example, that compulsory schooling was necessary so that all children would have some kind of “social life.” This is a fringe benefit—if indeed a benefit at all. Therefore the states cannot rule out an educational program on the grounds that it does not give students an adequate social life. In this area the states have no rights, and the rights of the parents are supreme.
Unschooling, for lack of a better term (until people start to accept “living” as part and parcel of learning), is the natural way to learn. However, this does not mean unschoolers do not take traditional classes or use curricular materials when the student, or parents and children together, decide that this is how they want to do it. Learning to read or do quadratic equations are not “natural” processes, but unschoolers nonetheless learn them when it makes sense to them to do so, not because they have reached a certain age or are compelled to do so by arbitrary authority. Therefore it isn’t unusual to find unschoolers who are barely eight years old studying astronomy or who are ten years old and just learning to read.
Professors of education have asked me many times over the years how we might improve teacher training. Until recently I have said that as long as we define teacher training as sending people to college to take education courses, nothing could make that process any less harmful than it already is. Young teachers so trained go into the classroom thinking that they know a great deal about children, learning, and teaching, when in fact they know next to nothing—which I would say even if I had taught all their classes. People so taught have nothing in their minds but words. They know no more about children and teaching than people who had lived all their lives in desert or jungle would know about snow-covered mountains just from hearing people talk about them. We cannot, by turning a complicated experience into words, give that experience to someone who has not had it. Hearing mountains or children described, even seeing photos or films of mountains or children, is no substitute at all for seeing and climbing actual mountains or working with actual children.
