John Holt

And I guess my mom and dad started having a conversation about the number of teachers who had low expectations for Indigenous kids.

And mom had been reading books by a guy named John Holt, who really articulately outlined what homeschooling can be and why.

why people should consider it.

And so my dad immediately, the idea of me not being sent to school just... made him relax.

But

if you look at the philosophy of unschooling or things written by John Holt or Pat Ferenga or other people like that about unschooling, which they call self-directed learning, it's supposed to be... very supported by parents.

So like unschooling done well, I've seen work tremendously well, but unschooling that is just do nothing with your children i mean i think people like that would say it's not unschooling but it it can be used that way or spoken of that way but like the philosophy itself i think has a lot to it um and i've used elements of it but what it what it is not or should not be is just like letting your kids do whatever and abdicating all your responsibility.

Because if a child is going to be unschooled well, if they've got an interest in dinosaurs, they need you to take them to the library.

I was homeschooled, really unschooled.

My mother was a devotee of John Holt, who wrote a book about unschooling.

and my siblings did not do a lot of what people might call traditional book learning.

I read voraciously.

And for most parent-educators- We don't even know what the array of options are.

Do you remember that feeling, Melissa? Like, as I began homeschooling, I was introduced to these theoreticians, right? I would read somebody like a Charlotte Mason or a John Holt or someone like Raymond and Dorothy Moore.

Yes.

And suddenly, I am armed with ideas that I could not have come up with on my own because I had never been trained.

It's funny because as a researcher and, like, a knowledge junkie, I took it for granted that that was step one of the process.

Oh, I want to homeschool my kids, I need to find out, like, w- what are the ways that people do it? And because we were having these discussions in writing at that time, which I really think is part of what enabled us to think deeply and process and retain what we were learning, it was just natural to, right, I'm gonna read the Chandlers, I'm gonna read John Holt, I'm going to read Maria Montessori and Charlotte Mason.

I'm gonna read what unschoolers are writing as that whole, like, paradigm itself is developing.

I saw it happening in real time while I'm nursing my, my two-month-old.

I mean, I've, I'm like, I've read your books.

I love all the John Taylor Gatto books, the John Holt books.

Yeah.

It's a very eye-opening, uh, path to go down.

... about, about trusting the things that you read in other people's experiences, and, um, your soul.

You know, I had read a book by John Holt called Learning All the Time.

It's called-

Yeah.

Yes and no.

So I came to unschooling through John Holt.

But like most of my life, I come at things in a sideways way because I discovered him as a maths teacher, not as an unschooler.

Interesting.

Now, her work is primarily for classroom teachers.

She's an educational researcher, all based around maths.

And what she talks about really ties in with what John Holt was talking about.

So I actually really feel that my experience within schools and classrooms is a real strength because I know I can constantly say to myself, it's not worth doing it like that.

They're like, you can't tell me how to raise my child.

And so you had some of those families that were beginning with John Holt and the growing without schooling movement and all that.

But the modern Christian homeschool movement began about 1983.

1988, my mother started publishing a national magazine on homeschooling.