John Holt (educator)

John Caldwell Holt (April_14, 1923 - September_14, 1985) was an American author and educator, one of the best known proponents of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.

Biography

Soon after his graduation from university, Holt joined the United States Navy and served on board the USS Barbero, a submarine that fought in the Pacific Ocean. During the war he came to the conclusion that nuclear weapons were the world's greatest danger, and only a world government could prevent nuclear war. After his three-year tour of duty, he got a job with the New York branch of the United World Federalists. Starting in the mail room, he became the executive director of the New York branch within six years. However, he became frustrated with the group's ineffectiveness, and he left the organization in 1952.

At the urging of his sister, Holt became a fifth-grade teacher. After several years of teaching in Colorado, he moved to Boston. It was here that he met Bill Hull, a fellow teacher, and they decided to start a classroom observation project; one would teach, while the other would watch. The notes and journal entries Holt accumulated during his first eleven years of teaching formed the core of his two popular books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, as well as his less-known and more radical work, Escape from Childhood: The Rights and Needs of Children. These three books detailed the foundational ideas of Holt's philosophy of education. He held that the primary reason children did not learn in schools was fear: fear of getting the wrong answers, fear of being mocked by the teacher and classmates, fear of not being good enough. This was worsened, he maintained, by children being forced to study things that they were not necessarily interested in.

Homeschooling

After many years of working within the school system, Holt became disillusioned with it. He became convinced that reform of the school system was not possible because it was fundamentally flawed. Thus, he became an advocate of homeschooling. It was not helpful, however, to simply remove children from the school environment if parents simply re-created it at home. Holt believed that children did not need to be coerced into learning; they would do so naturally if given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources. This line of thought became known as unschooling.

In 1977, Holt founded the nation's first homeschooling magazine, Growing Without Schooling and started John Holt's Bookstore.

In addition to favoring home schooling, Holt also espoused many of the principles now taken up by the Youth rights movement, including eliminating the voting age and allowing young people to sign contracts and obtain employment.

Effects on education

The writing of John Holt has influenced thousands of individuals and organizations, including Summerhill School, The Evergreen State College, National Youth Rights Association, and The Freechild Project. In 1985, John Holt died of cancer at the age of 62, having written 10 books that were very influential in the development of the homeschooling and unschooling movements.

Quotes

• "The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners."

• "It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."

• "Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."

Bibliography

• How Children Fail
• How Children Learn
• The Underachieving School
• What Do I Do Monday?
• Freedom and Beyond
• Escape From Childhood
• Instead of Education (1976)
• Never Too Late
• Teach Your Own
• Learning All the Time (1989)
• A Life Worth Living, letters of John Holt, edited by Susannah Sheffer

External links

• Wikiquote - Quotes by John Holt
• Holt GWS site has good information, including an interview with Holt by Mel Allen
• Book excerpt: Common Objections to Homeschooling
• Article: The Needs and Rights of Children: Steps to Take