Educational Theorist John Holt, author of Why Children Fail, used to tour the lecture circuit trying to persuade elementary and secondary schools to ease rigid rules and cut red tape. No longer. Despairing of reform within the nation's educational establishment, Holt has now decided to proselytize among parents, urging them to keep their children out of school and teach them at home.
Though Holt's message flies in the face of a century-old tradition, home schooling was much more common during earlier centuries; its notable graduates include the likes of Alexander the Great and John Stuart Mill. Says Holt: "What impedes learning today is teaching, too much of it. The teacher takes all the fuel that makes the learning engine run and turns the students into passive laboratory rats."
Holt, 55, is winning a growing if still small number of converts. A year ago, he launched a bimonthly newsletter. Growing Without Schooling, that now has 1,000 subscribers (at $10 a year). Within a decade, he estimates, almost 500,000 U.S. families will be schooling their children at home. That figure, he concedes, comes "out of a blue sky," yet it might not be all that fanciful. More and more parents are becoming disenchanted with rigid programs, school strikes and the reluctance of teachers to accept responsibility for students' failures to learn.
The ranks of the stay-at-homes are growing for other reasons as well. In Washington State a Mormon mother keeps her two daughters out of public schools because she fears they will be taught Darwinian concepts of evolution.
Parents of some 1,200 children in California's San Fernando Valley have set up small home classes in protest against a local busing order; most say they object not to integration but to their kids' spending one to three hours a day on school buses. Then too there are parents who teach their own youngsters because they have decided to pull up stakes and spend a few months or even years touring the U.S. in mobile homes.
One family with two boys who have never been enrolled in school lives on a small farm in Sheffield, Mass. Both parents read to their sons, aged eleven and nine, take them on hikes and involve them in farm chores; their mother, a college graduate, also takes them to special art, poetry and music classes in town. "They decide when and whether they'll learn something," says she. "We help them when they ask, but I'm more interested in how happy people are than if they can stand on their heads."