Tears No More in Jannah!

John Holt

Main article: John Holt (educator)

In 1964, John Caldwell Holt, a former World War II submariner with no professional training in education, published a book entitled How Children Fail which criticized traditional schools. The book was based on a theory he had developed as a teacher and an observer of children and education; that the academic failure of schoolchildren was caused by pressure placed on children in schools. The book became controversial^{[citation needed]}, and Holt began making appearances on major TV talk shows and writing book reviews for Life magazine. He also appeared as a guest on the To Tell The Truth TV game show.^[4] In his follow-up work, How Children Learn, 1967, he tried to demonstrate the learning process of children and why he believed school short circuits this process.

In these books, Holt had not suggested any alternative to institutional schooling; he had hoped to initiate a profound rethinking of education to make schools friendlier toward children. As the years passed he became convinced that the way schools were was what society wanted, and that a serious re-examination was not going to happen in his lifetime.

Leaving teaching to publicize his ideas about education full time, he encountered books by other authors questioning the premises and efficacy of compulsory schooling, like Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, 1970, and No More Public School by Harold Bennet, 1972. Then, in 1976, he published Instead of Education; Ways to Help People Do Things Better. In its conclusion he called for a “Children’s Underground Railroad” to help children escape compulsory schooling.^[4] In response, Holt was contacted by families from around the U.S. to tell him that they were educating their children at home. In 1977, after corresponding with a number of these families, Holt began producing a magazine dedicated to home education: Growing Without Schooling.^[5]

Holt later wrote a book about homeschooling, Teach Your Own, in 1981, and continued to hope for more expansive reform within education until his death in 1985.

Holt’s said: “… the human animal is a learning animal; we like 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.”^[6]. Holt later said, in 1980, “I want to make it clear that I don’t see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were.”^[6]

[edit] Raymond and Dorothy Moore

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.

They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8—12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.^[7] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects – even though the mothers were mentally retarded teenagers – and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, by western standards of measurement.^[7]

Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.^[7] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children — particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes — they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home — even with mediocre parents — than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: “This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children — when obviously most children already have even more secure housing.”^[8]

Similar to Holt, the Moores embraced homeschooling after the publication of their first work, Better Late Than Early, 1975, and went on to become important homeschool advocates and consultants with the publication of books like Home Grown Kids, 1981, Home School Burnout, and others.^[7]

One common theme in the homeschool philosophies of both Holt and the Moores is that home education should not be an attempt to bring the school construct into the home, or a view of education as an academic preliminary to life. They viewed it as a natural, experiential aspect of life that occurs as the members of the family are involved with one another in daily living.

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