John Caldwell Holt (April 14, 1923 – September 14, 1985) was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling (specifically the unschooling approach), and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
After a six-year stint teaching elementary school in the 1950s, Holt wrote the book How Children Fail (1964), which cataloged the problems he saw with the American school system. He followed it up with How Children Learn (1967). Both books were popular, and they started Holt's career as a consultant to American schools. By the 1970s he decided he would try reforming the school system and began to advocate homeschooling and, later, the form of homeschooling known as unschooling. He wrote a total of 11 books on the subject of schooling as well as starting the newsletter Growing Without Schooling (GWS).
Early life
Holt was born on April 14, 1923, in New York City; he had two younger sisters. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, then attended Yale University, graduating in 1943 with a degree in Industrial Engineering.
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 came to be called unschooling.
Holt's Growing Without Schooling newsletter, founded in 1977, was America's first home education newsletter. He also set up John Holt's Bookstore, which made selected books available by mail order. This brought in additional revenue that helped sustain the newsletter, which carried very little advertising.
Holt's sole book on homeschooling, Teach Your Own, was published in 1981. It quickly became the "Bible" of the early homeschooling movement. It was revised by his colleague Patrick Farenga and republished in 2003 by Perseus Books.
Holt on education
Holt wrote several books that have greatly influenced the unschooling movement. His writings have influenced many individuals and organizations, including the Evergreen State College, Caleb Gattegno, Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions, the National Youth Rights Association, and the Freechild Project.
Holt did not have a teaching degree, which many believe allowed for his work in the private school sector to make way for him to have a more objective opinion on the American school system. Being new to the environment, it is thought that he was able to make more objective distinctions than other educators as to what the schools said they were doing and what they were actually doing. For the first many years of his teaching career, he maintained the belief that schools overall were not meeting their missions due to using the wrong methods and pedagogical approaches, and that these failures were the cause for rendering young scholars as children who were less willing to learn and more focused on avoiding the embarrassment and ridicule of not learning.
As Holt wrote in his first book, How Children Fail (1964) "...after all, if they (meaning us) know that you can't do anything, then they won't blame you or punish you for not being able to do what you have been told to do." This notion led him to make changes within his own classroom to provide an environment in which his students would feel more comfortable and confident. With the support of his colleague Bill Hull, Holt began putting less emphasis on grades and tests, and began taking steps to decrease the notion of ranking the children. He focused on his students being able to grasp concepts, rather than having them work for the correct answer. Instead of using the typical methods to determine students' progress, he adopted a more student-centered approach. Patrick Farenga paraphrased Holt's distinction between good and bad students: "a good student is careful not to forget what he studied until after the test is taken." Eventually, his new methods for teaching caused him to be terminated from his position, which he claimed was due to the school wanting to maintain "old 'new' ideas not new 'new' ideas." This manual has since been revised by Holt follower and homeschooling parent Patrick Farenga, and is still distributed today.