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What disturbs some parents most is the fear that their children will make fewer friends because they stay at home. "Yes, she's a little lonely," admits a father whose eight-year-old daughter is learning at home, "and in a few years that could be more of a problem." John Holt bristles when the issue of social skills is raised. Says he: "If I had no other reason to keep kids out of school, the social life would be enough. In all the schools I know anything about, the social life of the children is meanspirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, full of talk about who went to whose birthday party and who got how many Valentine cards and who is talking to so-and-so and who is not." To those who claim that this constitutes realistic preparation for life's hard knocks. Holt replies: "The best preparation for bad experience is good—and anyway I don't want to prepare people to get along. I want them to resist, to change society for the better."
This month a Massachusetts judge upheld the right of parents "to preserve home education" under that state's laws. But many parents of stay-at-homes find themselves enmeshed in legal controversies with local truant officers. Laws on school attendance vary widely from state to state; some permit children to enroll in school as late as age eight (Arizona) and to leave as early as age 14 (Massachusetts). In addition, some parents are asked to prove they are qualified—in some cases, professionally certifiable as teachers—before a local judge or school board.
Some parents seek to avoid legal tangles by registering their children in correspondence schools. Among the largest are the Home Study Institute of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (1,100 elementary school children, 2,000 high school level) and Baltimore's Calvert School (4,500 elementary). Calvert's home instruction is said to have started when its headmaster made up lesson packets for children kept away from school by a whooping cough epidemic in 1906.
For parents who fret about not being trained teachers, John Holt has this advice: "It's like cooking—anybody can learn it. You can do a passable job by following a recipe book, and once you get some confidence in yourself, you take your nose out of the book and experiment on your own."
Of course, few stay-at-homes can hope for the kind of instruction that John Stuart Mill got both from his father James, one of the most brilliant men of 19th century England, and from Jeremy Bentham; or that Alexander the Great got from a tutor named Aristotle. But even those who reject Holt's radical solution find it hard to disagree with his view that administrative gobbledygook too often comes between children and their desire to learn. "People have been transmitting knowledge and skills for centuries," notes Holt. "Not everyone does it equally well, but it is an accessible skill."