John Holt (educator)

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.

[1] Directly after graduating he enlisted with the United States Navy, and served in World War II on the submarine USS Barbero.

[1] While teaching, Holt came to the belief that the students in his classroom, despite often being intelligent and from wealthy backgrounds, were more timid and unsure than the infant and toddler children of his sisters and friends.

[3] 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.

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.

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.

Although it took him some time to come to a conclusion about his own thoughts on education as well as make sense of his observations, studies, and data, ultimately he felt that schools were "a place where children learn to be stupid."

Despite his successful career, he still met rejections, resentment, and false hopes from colleagues and school systems surrounding his ideas and methods.

[4] After a few more years of teaching and some visiting professor positions at area universities, Holt wrote his next two books, The Underachieving School (1969) and What Do I Do Monday?

[5] Although many of Holt's previous works had discussed the needed reform and failure of the traditional school system, his seventh book, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Better (1976), focused more on his encouragement that parents find legal ways to remove their children from compulsory schools.

[5] Holt's focus began to switch from critiquing school systems and writing from afar to speaking engagements and educating adults on how they can teach their children while learning themselves.

This book, as noted in the first lines of the introduction, is "about ways we can teach children, or rather, allow them to learn, outside of schools—at home, or in whatever other places and situations (and the more the better) we can make available to them.

His final book, Learning All the Time: How Small Children Begin to Read, Write, Count and Investigate the World, Without Being Taught, was published posthumously in 1989.

The GWS' newsletter has since garnered followings in a number of different countries and has been continuously distributed since its inception as a tool for the promotion and encouragement of homeschooling in light of the lack of school system reform.