Learning All the Time by John Holt

This is the third post in my series about books related to teaching, learning and homeschooling. (See my earlier post for a description of the series.)

One of the points that David Guterson makes in his book Family Matters (the focus of my previous post) is that the word "homeschooling" is a misnomer, "a newspeak word for the attempt to gain an education outside of institutions." He writes:

"A homeschooler is not really a homeschooler at all but rather a younger person who does not go to school, a person best defined by what he does not do as opposed to by what he does. (It is sometimes used, too, to describe his parents, so that the term has often a double meaning: It encompasses both children who do not go to school and those who guide them in schools' stead.)" 

I've always felt slightly uncomfortable with the homeschooling label, as applied to myself or my children, and I know many others who feel the same way. Half the problem is that the "home" part of the term obscures the diversity of our individualized, out-in-the-world educational experiences. The other half of the problem is that describing education received outside of institutions as "schooling" tends to influence expectations.

If homeschooling is merely schooling at home, the thinking goes, why not expect parents to copy what teachers in schools are doing? In some highly-regulated states, this school-centric bias influences legislation as lawmakers and teachers assume that parents who choose to homeschool should be required to develop formal lesson plans and daily activities contrived to revolve around a standardized curriculum. They insist student progress must be evaluated frequently with timed tests and recorded in percentiles or letter grades.

But here's the problem: some of us who homeschool our children are doing so because the school model isn't a good fit for us. I tried the top-down, mom-as-teacher approach for a while when I first started homeschooling, but it felt wrong to me. Not only was it a struggle to get my daughter to do assignments that were contrived and not what she wanted to be doing, it was also hard for me to believe that I knew best what she needed to learn on a given day. She had been curious, motivated and able to learn without my intervention before we started homeschooling, so why did I now feel compelled to slip into the role of teacher? Why had I stopped doing what had been working so well?

Thank goodness someone handed me a copy of Learning All the Time by John Holt. What he wrote validated what I had been feeling:

"Anytime that, without being invited, without being asked, we try to teach somebody else something, anytime we do that, we convey to that person, whether we know it or not, a double message. The first part of the message is: I am teaching you something important, but you're not smart enough to see how important it is. Unless I teach it to you, you'd probably never bother to find out. The second message that uninvited teaching conveys to the other person is: What I'm teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn't teach it to you, you couldn't learn it." 

What Holt describes as "uninvited teaching" was what I had been doing when I'd been following a curriculum. I'd gone from being a mother who shared ideas and showed my daughter the world to being a teacher who said, "This is what you need to know, and this is how you will learn it." No wonder my daughter was getting angry: I wasn't trusting or respecting her choices.

Holt gave me the confidence to go back to being the person I was before I started thinking I had to be a schoolteacher. The way he wrote about children resonated with me because what he described matched my own experiences with my own children:

"Children are passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of the world around them, are extremely good at it, and do it as scientists do, by creating knowledge out of experience. Children observe, wonder, find, or make and then test the answers to the questions they ask themselves. When they are not actually prevented from doing these things, they continue to do them and to get better and better at it."

Intuitively, I knew I didn't need to force my daughter to learn; I just needed to avoid getting in her way. The best way to help my child, Holt explained, was to do what already came naturally to me as a mother.

"Like a naturalist, an observant parent will be alert both to small clues and to large patterns of behavior. By noticing these, a parent can often offer appropriate suggestions and experiences, and also learn whether the help and explanations already given have been adequate."  

John Holt changed the way I thought about education. He helped me to see the difference between being responsive to my child's needs—essentially, being the kind of mother I wanted to be—and being intrusive, turning my home into a school.

For More Information About John Holt and Learning All the Time

• Who Was John Holt? (Growing Without Schooling, JohnHoltGWS.com)
• A Conversation with John Holt (The Natural Child Project)
• FUN Books (formerly John Holt Bookstore)