John Holt - Teach Your Own: The Indispensable Guide to Living and Learning with Children at Home

A S A VETERAN HOMESCHOOLER AND AUTHOR , I field many questions about the lost educational and social opportunities homeschoolers face by not attending school, especially How will my children get into college or find work without a proper school transcript? and How will my children socialize if theyre not in school? The COVID-19 pandemic made these questions pertinent to every parent, not just to those considering homeschooling. Further, headlines such as Research Shows Students Falling Months Behind During Virus Disruptions and A Lost Generation: Surge of Research Reveals Students Sliding Backward, Most Vulnerable Worst Affected exacerbated our fears about children falling behind in school and therefore in life, causing further anxiety in families.

Dont let the hype upset you; your children will continue to learn and grow whether or not they are in school. Homeschoolers matriculate in and out of school, get into college, and find work they want to do without running through schools curricular gauntlet. Our lives and careers often do not run in the same patterns as educational institutions, or as we, ourselves, wish. Missing months or years of standard school learning does not take an equivalent amount of time to regain, if one needs to learn it at all.

Education is an important element of civil society, but it has become a sedentary institution, serving much more as a gatekeeper for employment opportunities instead of enabling active learning for students. Both in-person and online education continue to operate on the assumption that by exposing all children to the same information at the same time they will learn it. This core belief is hard to shake; generations of school reforms to make schooling more personalized have tried it and failed. Ivan Illich summarized this situation in The Futility of Schooling (1968): And yet it is politically inexpedient and intellectually disreputable to question the elusive goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all citizens by giving them access to an equal number of years in school.

To even question the order in which school subjects are taught is to invite being labeled nave or an enemy of education. For instance, in school the main reason for making sure children can read by the end of third grade is school management issues, not a childs biological development. In puberty, hair growth is spontaneous and happens to all healthy children over a range of time; there is no equivalent biological process in our bodies that triggers You will learn to read now. Reading is a learned behavior, and forcing someone to learn something they dont want to do can actually delay or impede learning.

However, the curriculum after third grade requires competent reading skills to succeed in school. Homeschoolers have long noted, and research shows, that when children are not forced to learn to read at home, boys tend to learn to read later than girls do. Once a child decides to learn to read, they learn quickly, catching up to their age-mates reading abilities in weeks or months, not years. Further,

This is why John preferred to refer to his work as unschooling; to describe learning that doesnt have to take place in school or at home and does not resemble school learning. Homeschooling has become the default word that captures many forms of learning without attending school. John often used unschooling and homeschooling interchangeably in his talks and writing, but it is clear that duplicating school at home is not what John meant when he used the word homeschooling.