John Caldwald HoltED 530 Theorist Presentation

Summer Session 2010Pam Quaglia

Background• Born April 14, 1923 in New York City• The son of well-to-do parents• Formally educated in private schools in the United States and

abroad• Studied to be an industrial engineer at Yale University• Joined the Navy at age twenty• Served for three years during World War II• Began working for the United

World Federalists in New York (1946)

Image Source: http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2007/09/what-is-unschoo.html

Background• Traveled throughout Europe (1952-1953)• Started teaching at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School• Taught elementary and secondary school for over ten

years• Eventually decided schools could not be reformed and

left the classroom to pursue writing and lecturing (1967)• Popular speaker, known as an advocate of school reform• Visiting teacher for education departments at Harvard

University and University of California, Berkeley• Died September 14, 1985

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. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

Educational Theories• Author and advocate of home schooling• Believed home schooling offered many advantages such

as intimacy, flexibility, and time control• Felt that schools were a kind of artificial institution and

the home was a natural one • Coined the term “unschooling”• Unschooling refers to the education of children outside

the formal school institution• Believed that pressure and other tensions of the formal

schooling environment negatively affected children and their learning

Educational Theories

• His ideas were considered offensive to other educators• Believed school pressures played a role in students lack

of attention• Believed children were actually afraid in the school

setting causing them to worry • Felt that children needed to feel at ease to be able to start

using their brain instead of worrying • A scared learner is a poor learner

Books

• How Children Fail, first book in 1964, describes how school suppresses natural curiosity and creativity and encourages compliance and “good work”

• How Children Learn, his second book in 1976, continued his views on the institution of school and criticized large class sizes due to his belief that children learned best alone or in small groups

• First two books sold over a million and a half copies

Books

• Wrote numerous books throughout the next decade and his remaining years concerning education theory and practice, alternative schools, and other school related social issues

• Unfinished at the time of his death, Learning All the Time, was completed with material from his book Growing Without Schooling and published in 1989

Additional Works

• Created “Growing Without Schooling” in 1977, America’s first magazine concerning issues surrounding home schooling

• Magazine has continued even after his death

Home Schooling

• The practice of educating children at home instead of the traditional public or private school setting

• Approximately 1.1 million students were being home schooled in the spring of 2003 according to data from the 2003 National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES)

• Laws for home schooling vary widely from state to state concerning teacher licensure, testing, curriculum and paperwork

Home Schooling 2003Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the 2003 National Household Education Surveys program.

Quotes

• What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world: plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.

~ John Holt

References

Adapted from "Mothering Interviews John Holt", Mothering, Issue 19, Spring 1981, with the kind permission of Marlene Bumgarner, Mothering, and Holt Associates. Retrieved May 25, 2010 from http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/marlene_bumgarner.html#1275286907.

Cambridge Forum Speakers 1970-1990. John Caldwell Holt. Retrieved May 29, 2010 from http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/cfs/john_caldwell_holt.php.

Costley, K. (2006). Remember John Holt and "How Children Fail?" A Book Review. Online Submission. Retrieved from ERIC database.

IES National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved May 26, 2010 from http://nces.ed.gov/nhes/homeschool/.

John Holt (1923 – 1985) Retrieved May 25, 2010 from <a href="http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2049/Holt-John-1923-1985.html">John Holt (1923–1985)</a>.

John Holt and Growing Without Schooling. Retrieved May 25, 2010 from http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html.