Teaching Children at Home

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."

The impact of this educational laissez-faire on the children? "Quite marvelous for all of us," says their mother. "They need much less attention and entertainment than other children their age. They're not anxious about whether other people approve of them. They are moving in the direction of becoming truly mature people who have judgments, peacefulness and care for each other." Says her eleven-year-old son: "For some reasons I'm lucky and for some reasons I'm not. I know lots of things other children don't know. I know how to plant seeds and how to grow a garden. Last spring I read Tolkien and all of James Herriot's books. Oh, and I like C.S. Lewis." The boy does concede that he is "not so hot at arithmetic," but he counters: "I ask a lot of questions. That's how you learn. In school you can't ask questions."

To satisfy the local school district, this family has accepted a school "administrator" for their home curriculum, Sheffield's district psychologist Paul Shafiroff, who is responsible for evaluating the children's progress. The boys, he says, "possess skills generally equivalent to their grade level." Shafiroff notes: "More parents would like to do this if they could get the support of the schools."

One advantage cited by many of the parents who teach their own children is the freedom to allow them to pursue a subject for as long as they remain interested. Navy Commander Dennis McCahill, an Annapolis graduate, yanked his four children from their Annapolis, Md., school because "the system clamps down on any originality or creativity." How, he asks, "can one teacher answer all the children's questions when there's one teacher for 25 or 30 children? If a child is really interested in geography or any particular topic, after one hour he is expected to put away whatever he is doing and start something new."

The burdens imposed by home schooling can be formidable. "I wouldn't recommend it to everyone," says Housewife Eileen Trombly of Niantic, Conn., who for a time schooled all three of her daughters at home. "The house went to pot," she recalls. "The kids were home all the time." Then too there is the problem of disapproval from neighbors. "People in the community think we're fanatics," says Robert Sessions, a philosophy teacher at Iowa's Luther College, "when we're really pretty ordinary people."

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."

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