Kelly Lovejoy

No, not by *me*! <g>

I just thought some of you might be interested in what John Holt said years and years ago.

~Kelly



A Conversation with John Holt (1980)
Interviewer: Marlene Bumgarner

In 1980, Marlene Bumgarner, a homeschooling parent, hosted author John Holt in her
home while he was in California for a lecture tour. While he played in the garden with her
two children, John and Dona Ana, she interviewed him for the bimonthly magazine
Mothering.

What is your philosophy of learning?
Basically that the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we need to learn; we
are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. made to do it. What kills
the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

Why homeschooling?

That's a big question. The great advantage is intimacy, control of your time, flexibility of
schedule, and the ability to respond to the needs of the child, and to the inclinations. If
the child is feeling kind of tired or out of sorts, or a little bit sick, or kind of droopy in
spirits, okay, we take it easy, and things go along very calmly and easily. When the child is
full of energy and rambunctious, then we tackle big projects, we try tough stuff, we look at
hard books. And I think schools could do much more than they do in this kind of
flexibility, but in fact they don't. I want to make it clear that I don't see homeschooling as
some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for
the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best
base no matter how good the schools were. The proper relationship of the schools to
home is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. It is a
supplementary resource.

But the school is a kind of artificial institution, and the home is a very natural one. There
are lots of societies without schools, but never any without homes. Home is the center of
the circle from which you move out in all directions, so there is no conceivable
improvement in schools that would change my mind about that.

What does one do at a homeschool?

That's what Growing Without Schooling is about, of course. What one can do depends a lot
on what one's own life is. A lot of families have small businesses or subsistence farms or
crafts, or various kinds of activities that the parents are involved in, which the children are
also very involved in. The children just partake in the life of the adults wherever they are,
and then questions are answered as they come up. Other people may live at home and
work somewhere else; they may have a more conventional kind of existence.

I don't believe in formal fixed curriculums, but it may very well be that when parents and
children start off, they're both a little nervous. They're both wondering what they should
be doing. If it makes people feel happier to have a little schedule, and to work with a
correspondence school for a year or so, kind of as a security blanket, there's nothing
wrong with that. It's a starting place.

My advice is always to let the interests and the inclinations of the children determine what
happens and to give children access to as much of the parents' lives and the world around
them as possible, given your own circumstances, so that children have the widest possible
range of things to look at and think about. See which things interest them most, and help
them to go down that particular road.

How that's done depends very much on the family's circumstances and their interests, and
the particular interests of the children. Some kids are bookish, some children like to build
things, some are more mathematical or computerish, or artistic, or musical, or whatever.
The mix is never going to be exactly the same.

Does homeschooling require that the parents spend a great deal of structured time with
their children in a formal learning situation?

Homeschooling doesn't require that parents spend a great deal of structured time. I think
as parents get into this they tend to spend less time. How much time they spend with their
kids depends a little on the circumstances in their own lives. Sometimes they spend a lot
of time in company together just because it's fun. Other times that's harder for them to
do. The children, though they may enjoy a lot of their parents' company during the day,
don't need it once they get past 7 or 8.

Is the parent without background in education or experience as a teacher at a
disadvantage in a homeschooling situation?

I'd say they have a very great advantage. I wouldn't say that a person was disqualified
from doing it because they had had training in education, but I would have to say that
practically everything they taught you at that school of education is just plain wrong. You
have to unlearn it all. I never had any of that educational training. The most exclusive,
selective, demanding private schools in this country do not hire people who have
education degrees. If you look through their faculties - degrees in history, mathematics,
English, French, whatever - you will not see degrees in education. I think for the most
prestigious private schools you could almost set it down as a fact that to have a teacher's
certificate, to have had that kind of training, would disqualify you.

Are parents talented or knowledgeable enough to teach physics or math?

Oh, well, the children don't have to learn physics or math from you. There are plenty of
people to learn from; there are plenty of books; there are plenty of extension courses.
GWS will have information on that. There are plenty of other people to answer your
questions. And the children don't have to get it all from Mom and Pop. There are people
who have only high schooling, or may not even have finished that, who are now teaching
their children at home and doing a very good job of it.

What about the child's social life?

As for friends – you're not going to lock your kids in the house. I think the socializing
aspects of school are ten times as likely to be harmful as helpful. The human virtues -
kindness, patience, generosity, etc. are learned by children in intimate relationships,
maybe groups of two or three. By and large, human beings tend to behave worse in large
groups, like you find in school. There they learn something quite different - popularity,
conformity, bullying, teasing, things like that. They can make friends after school hours,
during vacations, at the library, in church.

What about the opportunity for youths to meet members of other backgrounds, other
socioeconomic classes?

Most of the schools that I know anything about are tracked - there would be a college
track, and a business track, and a vocational track. Studies have shown over the years that
these tracks correlate perfectly with economic class. I think I know enough about most
high schools in this country to say there is very little mingling of people from different
backgrounds, different religious groups. The rich kids hang out with the rich kids, the
jocks hang out with the jocks, the pointy heads hang out with the pointy heads, the
greasers hang out with the greasers. Maybe there are some exceptions to that . . . but the
idea of school as a social melting pot where people of all kinds of backgrounds get
together - pure mythology, folks.

What is your philosophy about teaching reading?

I think the teaching of reading is mostly what prevents reading. Different children learn
different ways. I think reading aloud is fun, but I would never read aloud to a kid so that
the kid would learn to read. You read aloud because it's fun and companionable. You hold
a child, sitting next to you or on your lap, reading this story that you're having fun with,
and if it isn't a cozy, happy, warm, friendly, loving experience, then you shouldn't do it. It
isn't going to do any good.

I think children are attracted toward the adult world. It's nice to have children's books, but
far too many of them have too much in the way of pictures. When children see books, as
they do in the family where the adults read, with pages and pages and pages of print, it
becomes pretty clear that if you're going to find out what's in those books, you're going to
have to read from that print. I don't think there's any way to make reading interesting to
children in a family in which it isn't interesting to adults.

What your philosophy about math?

My approach to math is to say, What do we adults use numbers for? We use them to
measure things. And we measure things so that having measured them we can do things
with them, or make certain judgements about them. And so I say let children do with
numbers what we do with numbers. I'm a great believer in many kinds of measuring
instruments - tapes (centimeter tape, inch tapes, rolls of tapes), rulers, scales,
thermometers, barometers, metronomes, electric metronomes with lights flashing on and
off that you can make go faster and slower, stopwatches, things for time.

Another thing is money. Kids are fascinated by money. We all say: "We'll have to teach
them all this arithmetic so that some day they can deal with money." I think dealing with
money is inherently interesting to children. I say family finances ought to be out on the
table, charts on the wall: expenses, food, taxes, insurance, health care, how much this
costs, how much it cost last year. I think actually, like typing, double-entry bookkeeping
and basic accounting are fascinating skills, and if you're talking about basics, those are
basics.

The fundamental idea of double-entry bookkeeping, the distinction between your income
and expenses and assets and liabilities is one of the really beautiful inventions of the
human mind. It's fabulous the way it works, and I think families should do their finances
as if they were a little teeny corporation with income and expenses and assets and
liabilities and depreciation.

Some kids might get to the point where they would want to be the family treasurer and
keep the family books and balance the checkbook. This is all really "big adult stuff." Let
the child write out the checks that are paying the bills, instead of the harassed picture, you
know, of father with his tie untied, sitting at the desk and papers all over the place. Why?
This is inherently interesting, so let's at least make this part of our life - like every other
part - accessible to children. The best way to meet numbers is in real life, as everything
else. It's embedded in the context of reality, and what schooling does is to try to take
everything out of the context of reality. So everything appears like some little thing
floating around in space, and it's a terrible mistake. You know, there are numbers in
building; there are numbers in construction; there are numbers in business; there are
numbers in photography; there are numbers in music; there are fractions in cooking. So
wherever numbers are in real life, then let's go and meet them and work with them.

What subject matter do you see as essential?

None.*

What about the parent who works outside of the home?

One question which often comes up is "How am I going to teach my kids six hours a day?"
And I respond to that by saying, "Who's teaching your kids six hours a day now?" I was a
good student in supposedly the best schools and it was a rare day that I got five minutes
of teaching... that's five minutes of somebody's serious attention to my personal needs,
interests, concerns, difficulties, problems. Like most other kids in school, I learned that if
you don't understand what's going on, for heaven's sake, keep your mouth shut. What
happens when children become ill, or have an injury, etc.? Home teachers come in for
three to five hours a week. It has been found that this is perfectly sufficient. These
children don't fall behind. No child needs, or should stand, six hours of teaching a day,
even if a parent were of a mind to give it. It would drive them up the wall!

How are homeschoolers evaluated when they go to enroll at the university level?

Just like anyone else. You know, there are these tests you can take... the College Boards,
the SAT, and so forth. Actually, homeschoolers do exceptionally well on these things.
They're more motivated to learn what areas will be covered, and prepare for them.

Does it sometimes happen that a homeschooling student will express a desire to go to or
return to traditional schooling? How do parents handle this?

Various ways. Sometimes parents have to decide (we're the grownups) that we don't want
them to go back to that school, and then stick with it. But other times, if the children want
to go, then that means they're immune to the manipulation the schools can do with the
children who don't have a choice about whether they have to be there or not. The school
loses some of its power when the children know they can quit if they want.


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* Once when John Holt was speaking to a school audience, describing his views on the
their structured curriculum, a student asked him, "But surely there must be something
important enough that everyone should learn it?" He thought for a moment and replied,
"To learn to say `I'm sorry', `I don't know', and `I was wrong'." [unpublished anecdote]