Many people who read my newsletter ask me to recommend other newsletters, so today I’m going to oblige… and recommend a newsletter from four decades ago.

Last month, when it became clear that our kids would be home from school indefinitely, I dug out the first collected volume of John Holt’s Growing Without Schooling.

The newsletter began in 1977, to be “about ways in which people, young or old, can learn and do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.” (It continued through Holt’s death in 1985 until 2001.)

The archive of back issues is available online, and taken together, they form “a record of a grassroots movement,” a remarkable countercultural document of parents trying to figure out how to help their children learn from home at a time when homeschooling was, in many states, illegal. (Many of the issues are filled with legal advice and stories of parents’ interactions with school officials and judges.)

The newsletter is also interesting from a technological and historical perspective — particularly for millennial parents who might be “digital natives” — showing how people grew community and shared knowledge without the aid of the internet. (In some ways, I think they might’ve been better off.)

Holt actually set out with the intention of making the newsletter timeless. “Most of what we print in GWS will be as useful in five or ten years as on the day we print it,” he wrote. “In that sense, the word ‘newsletter’ may be a little misleading. What we really are, I guess, is a reference book published a piece at a time.”

I’ve been particularly influenced by Holt’s book, How Children Learn. Reading GWS, I came to realize how much it seems like a first draft of his later books — if you pick up Teach Your Own or Learning All The Time, you’ll see a lot of familiar material. (In some ways, it reminds me of reading Thoreau’s journal vs. his finished essays and books.)

Starting in mid-April, I read an issue every day, tweeting out my favorite bit. While that might’ve been a little ambitious, it did what I intended it to do: it gave me a picture, from parents forty years ago, of how kids can learn and thrive at home.

I am not optimistic about the chances of schools opening later this year (or rather, I can see them opening, but not staying open) and I see many parents out there struggling with trying to figure out how to homeschool their children. I believe that Holt’s books and Growing Without Schooling provide a healthy alternative to “distance learning,” or, rather, the replication of school-like busywork done at home through the computer screen, the small amount of which we’ve already experienced as exhausting for everyone, unsustainable, and probably, ultimately ineffective. (My new favorite genre in social media is all the creative ways students have learned to get out of Zoom calls and online homework.)

The alternative is this: What if school, in fact, isn’t the best place for your kids to learn? What if you didn’t try to replicate school at home? What if you had the opportunity, now, to try something else? What if we saw this time as a radical opportunity to let our kids learn and explore their interests unfettered by the demands of the classroom?  What would happen if you stopped worrying about teaching them and gave your kids the time, space, and materials to lead their own learning?  What would happen if you let them in on your working life, let them see you working, involved them more deeply in the work of keeping up a house and a home life?

These are the ideas that Growing Without Schooling explored. Perhaps it’s put best by a mother in issue 2: “What I hope is that the children not only will flower more truly in their home environment, but also will be enriched by growing up with parents who are attempting to live their beliefs.”

Not every household will be ready for these ideas, but by merely reading about other modes of living and learning that other households have engaged in, we can discover new possibilities for our own.

Below are my tweeted highlights from the first 19 issues. (If these ideas appeal to you, you might also be interested in my “unschooling” tag.)

* * *

GWS #1 – Reading John Holt’s GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING newsletter, first published in 1977 “about ways in which people, young or old, can learn & do things, acquire skills, & find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.”

“Your kids don’t need, don’t want, and couldn’t stand six hours of your teaching a day, even if you wanted to do that much. To help them find out about the world doesn’t take that much adult input. Most of what they need, you have been giving them since they were born. As I have said, they need access.

* * *

GWS #2 – On not-knowing:

May I underline, among all the good things in this letter, I’s words, “knowing nothing, I knew everything.” We don’t have to know everything, or even very much, to give useful answers to children’s questions. A child asking a question does not want to know everything; he wants to take a step or two further into the world in a given direction. It is all right even to make a wild guess, and then say, “That’s what I think, but if you like we can look it up in a book and see what it says.” This gives the idea that when you don’t know something you can always go look it up somewhere.

* * *

GWS #3 – On our nature as learning creatures:

What we want is to find out how the machine works, and then to work it. We want to find out why things happen, so that we can make them happen. Maybe we want this too much; in the long run (or not so long) it may be our undoing. But that is the kind of creature we are. Any theory of learning or teaching which begins by assuming that we are some worm-like or rat-like or pigeon-like creature is nonsense and can only lead to endless frustration and failure.

* * *

GWS #4 – Time off puts us back in touch with why we do things:

if we give children (or adults, for that matter) enough time, free or as free as possible from destructive outside pressures, the chances are good that they will once again find within themselves their reasons for doing things.

* * *

GWS#5 – My favorite parts of GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING are the letters from parents who write in about their unschooling experience.

Here’s a mother from issue 5:

When I am trying to “stimulate their interest” in something, the very artificiality of the endeavor (and rudeness, really —I have no business even trying) builds a barrier between us. But when I am sharing something I really love with them because I also really love them, all barriers are down, and we are communicating intimately. When they also love what I love — a song, a poem, the salmon returning to the creek to spawn — the joy is exquisite: we share a truth. But our differences are also a truth. Common thread and fiber we share, but not the whole piece.

* * *

GWS #6: “You may make mistakes, or fail, and so, feel disappointment, or shame, or anger, or disgust. Just in order to get started on this adventure, most people need as much comfort, reassurance, and security as they can find.”

* * *

GWS #7: John Holt on how much we tell our children, in 1979:

Many things in the world around me seem to me ugly, wasteful, foolish, cruel, destructive, and wicked. How much of this should I talk to my children about? I tend to feel, not much. I prefer to let, or help, children explore as much of the world as they can, and then make up their own minds about it. If they ask me what I think about something, I will tell them. But if I have to criticize the world in their hearing, I prefer to do it in specifics, rather than give the idea that I think the world, in general, is a bad place. I don’t think it is, and for all the bad that is in it, I would much rather be in it than out of it. I am in no hurry to leave. Even if I thought the world, and the people in it, was more bad than good, I don’t think I would tell children so. Time enough for them to learn all that is bad. I would not have wanted to know, when I was young, all that I now know about what is wrong with the world. I’m not sure that I could have stood to know it. Time, and experience, and many friends and pleasures, have given me many assets to balance against that knowledge, things to put in the other side of the scales. Children don’t have many of these. They need time to learn about some of the good things while they are learning (as they are bound to) about the bad.

* * *

GWS #8: On getting down on the floor (“You better get down on the floor / Don’t you know this is war?” —Tom Waits)

Most parents are not willing to get on the floor. I mean this literally and figuratively. That’s where these children are most of the time—and that’s where you have to be willing to go if you want to really hear what they have to say. Also, perhaps it is a matter of “letting go,” or being interested or excited about the world, and getting your hands dirty exploring it. In your words, DOING. To too many people, teaching is lecturing —telling facts to deaf ears.

* * *

GWS #9: Play is children’s work:

Play is children’s work, and we learned to respect this as we did our own. They were lucky, for they had space and clumps of materials left around by the builders. They played with the earnest dedication of artists.

* * *

GWS #10: Always worth remembering: You don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it.

Anne Herbert writes in the Winter ’78 CoEvolution Quarterly about how our whole culture deceives us into thinking a thing must be done perfectly or not at all. No amateurs in life. Perhaps the root of this is things no longer made by hand. I remember growing up being mystified as to how things as perfect, gleaming and sleek as cars were made, being told they were made in factories, and deciding factories must be where machines lived as obviously only a sleek and gleaming machine could produce another.

* * *

GWS #11: A father writes in October 1979:

Let me tell you what happened to our son after we removed him from a local public school’s first grade last November. He stopped wetting his bed, he stopped suffering from daily stomach upsets and headaches and he has not had a cold for six months, although he averaged one cold a month while attending school. He has gained five pounds and has grown almost two inches. And he is happy!

(This has been a really odd silver lining of the pandemic: since they started going to school, we’ve never gone this long without one of the boys being sick.)

* * *

GWS #12, Dec. 1979. John Holt writes to a high school student considering going to college for interior design:

What I’m saying is, learn all you can on your own before you spend any money on a school. Don’t spend money on a school until you have found that there are some things you have to know in order to work as an interior designer that you can learn only (or most easily) in schools. The people to ask about that are interior designers. Find out where they learned what they now know.

(He suggests the student learn to type letters in order to “trick” adults into taking him seriously.)

* * *

GWS #13: (1980.) Lots of good stuff in this one. Hard to pick a highlight, but I like these two parents talking about how much better life at home is when nobody’s a teacher and everybody’s a learner:

One more thing — we never ask our kids to do things that that we don’t do ourselves, and consequently we inspire each other. We all read a lot, we all write a lot, we all speak very broken French we all practice the piano, etc. People are often amazed at how “selfless” I am. They think they could never spend so much time with their kids, do all the necessary preparation it must take to “teach” all those subjects, etc. Actually, I have never been so self-indulgent. I always wanted to learn French and take piano lessons and when Ishmael asked to do these things, I knew that here was my chance.

On “playing jailer”:

Any kid who has ever been to school knows that “school” is only a special name for a kid’s jail, and it’s hard for them to imagine having fun, doing what they want, or being creative in jail. So they expect you to tell them what to do, because that’s what happens in “school.” I find that playing jailer just takes too much energy. I burn out quickly. Yet I can be with those same kids all summer long when they don’t expect anything from me, and they give me energy. It could go on forever, and I’d never burn out.

* * *

* * *

GWS #15 (1980) The contents are overshadowed once again (IMO) by Holt’s great book reviews. Here’s a review of E.B. White’s ONE MAN’S MEAT: 

…he very correctly guessed and feared that for many or most people the world of the TV screen would come to seem more real than the actual world
around them. At one point he says:

“When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waste deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”

And how much more true now than then. In these essays he points out, just in passing, what Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry (then young boys) were to say a more than a generation later, that speed of movement does not lessen but increases the distances between people, does not draw a society together but blows it apart; and that in both the physical and spiritual sense our country would be in very serious trouble unless many people learned to see farming, not simply as a way to make money, but as a way to live. We did not learn these lessons, and we are indeed in serious trouble, with more to come.

* * *

GWS #16 has some good sections on learning music, and this great tip we learned early: give your kids the highest-quality art materials you can afford. 

When I first met him in Paris, Arno Stern quickly convinced me that when introducing children to “art,” or painting, or working with colors, it was extremely important to give even the youngest of them good quality materials to work with. Looking at some of the work children had done in his workshop, I was struck by the brilliance and beauty of the colors. I had never seen such colors in school “art” classes, or in paintings done by children in school. The reason is that most schools — at least, those that can afford to have “art” at all — try to save money by using cheap materials. This means that children usually paint with cheap poster paints on low grade newsprint, not white but a pale buff color.

* * *

GWS #17 (Oct. 1980) is pretty massive, great stuff about math, drawing, architecture, and cars, but I love this part, which is essentially Show Your Work! for parents: 

Children need to get some sense of the processes by which good work is done. The only way they can learn how much time and effort it takes to build, say, a table, is to be able to see someone building a table, from start to finish. Or painting a picture. Or repairing a bicycle, or writing a story, or whatever it may be.

They need to SEE you working:

Children need to see things done well. Cooking, and especially baking, where things change their texture and shape (and taste yummy), are skills that children might like to take part in. Typing might be another, printing sake another, and either or both of these could be added to bookmaking and bookbinding. These are crafts that children could take part in from beginning to end. Skilled drawing and painting, or woodworking, might be others.

Adults must use the skills they have where children can see them. If they have no skills to speak of, they should learn some, and let the children see them learning, even if only as simple a thing as touch typing.

* * *

GWS #18 quotes Pete Seeger: 

People should not learn to read music until they have a good repertoire of songs they like to sing under their belt. When they know what kind of music they like and how they want to sing it, then they can learn to read. One wouldn’t teach a child dance notation before the child can dance. One never teaches a baby to read before it can talk. Music notes tend to freeze the musician into thinking these notes are the “way it MUST go.”

* * *

GWS #19 contains a story about a 6-year-old author:

“I don’t know where Luciano gets the ideas for his stories”, his mother says. “He won’t accept suggestions from us, and if we try to help he throws a tantrum and runs into his room.”

(This is basically how I handle editorial input, too!)