John Caldwell Holt wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn in the 1960’s. His ideas are credited for getting a lot of people to consider homeschooling, and more specifically, unschooling.
John Holt started out as a teacher, but quickly became disillusioned after participating in a joint teaching/observation project, where one teacher taught while the other watched. What he observed was that children did not learn out of fear of being wrong or ridiculed.
John Holt is quoted as saying,
“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.”
In 1977, Mr. Holt founded a magazine called “Growing Without Schooling” and started a bookstore where he sold educational materials to homeschoolers.
John Holt died in 1985, but his legacy continues. I had the pleasure to meet Pat Farenga at a homeschooling conference I attended in 2002. He had recently discontinued the publishing of Holt’s magazine, Growing Without Schooling, and was working on several of his own homeschooling projects. Since then, he has had Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling published and was touring and speaking on unschooling in the United States. He has also published several informational recordings on homeschooling.
I also met Peter Kowalke at that same conference. He was 23 at the time and had unschooled his entire life. While he had attended college,he did not believe a diploma was necessary to succeed in life. Like his previous education, he did not feel any need to take classes outside his realm his curiosity level. At the time, he was working on Grown Without Schooling a documentary on homeschooling. I found him to be highly intelligent and articulate. If you want to know what the first batch of homeschooled adults is like, (homeschooling became popular in the late 1980’s), you may want to purchase this video. Peter continues to advocate and speak to and for homeschoolers, and according to his website, he is currently looking for a magazine editing job. While not all of the outcomes in the video paint the brightest of pictures, it is still painfully obvious that these kids did learn and blossom in a way dramatically different from children in public school. Personally, I feel that different can be good.
While I do not unschool my children, I have to admit that what I have read and heard from these people definately intrigues me. I try to work some time into every day for free exploration for my children.