The baleful influence of John Holt

I received an email last night, reproaching me for singling out Leslie Barson as  somebody who would like to see the abolition of compulsory education in this country. It was pointed out that many of the better known figures in the British home educating scene share her feelings about this.  This is of course quite true and it makes one wonder how many more of John Holt’s stranger views are held by modern home educators in this country.  Voting at the age of three? Four year-olds being allowed to drive cars on the roads? Five year-olds injecting heroin?   Abolishing the age of consent and legalising paedophilia? But let us focus today upon just one of Holt’s key ideas; that children should be free to abandon education and start work whenever they feel ready to do so. It is this which Leslie Barson  thinks a good idea and she is not alone.

Something to bear in mind here is that well-meaning and good-hearted people tend to assume that everybody else is like them. The home educators who would like to see the end of compulsory education are thinking in terms of parents taking responsibility for their children’s education and not being forced into it by the state. It is a noble vision, but one which history teaches us would have the direst consequences for children. Let’s look both at the past and present to see what the likely consequence would be if there was no compulsion to ensure that our children received an education. Compulsory education in this country came into force in 1880 and there was enormous opposition to it from parents. During the following decade, prosecution of parents for their children’s non-attendance at school was the commonest offence in this country, apart from drunkenness. There were over a  100,000 cases a year. These were not home educating parents who resented the state trying to usurp parental authority. They were mothers and fathers who wanted their small children to go to work and earn money. They were driven by economic necessity, rather than a philosophy of education.

More recently, before the school leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972, many working class children at grammar schools were forced to leave school before taking their GCEs, because their parents wanted them to get jobs. An awful lot of children were thus deprived of the chance to go into higher education. This still happens today. I know of a number of cases of children who have left school with good GCSEs and want to attend sixth form or college. Their parents tell them that they can’t afford to keep supporting them and so the children have to get jobs instead. Raising the school leaving age to 18 will rescue some of these children and enable them to go on to university if they wish. Compulsory education protects these young people and allows them to fulfill their potential.

The problem is that many home educating parents come from comfortable, middle class backgrounds and simply don’t know how things work in the real, ordinary world. If compulsory education was abolished and parents were not forced to send their children to school, many would not bother at all about their children’s education. Their only concern would be how soon they could have another wage coming into the house, so that they could cope with the next electricity bill. Lower the school leaving age to 14 and masses of working class children will be forced to drop out of school for this reason. Ideas like this will generally benefit the middle classes  and penalise horribly children from working class homes. Raise the school leaving age to 18 and this will have the opposite effect. 

I hope to look in future posts about which other of John Holt’s ideas might be popular among home educators today. I have an idea that examining this question  might shed light upon the frantic reluctance of some of these types to allow anybody from the local authority into their homes! Those who would abolish compulsory education and allow eight and nine  year-olds to work in the fields again, as they did before 1880, are clearly not overly committed to the welfare of young children; to put the case mildly.

I have written extensively on this question of compulsory education and the effect that it has had upon improving the lot of working class children. In particular, the introduction of compulsory education in the late 19th century is covered in Chapter 1 of Elective Home Education in the UK, Trentham Books 2010. The business about working class children being compelled to leave at 15, before sitting their GCEs, is treated in detail in The Best Days of our Lives; School Life in Post-War Britain, The History press 2013.

The origins of Education Otherwise and a major strand of British home education

British home education may be roughly divided into two major strands. These may not inaptly be called the sensible and silly movements. Over the last week or two, we have mainly been looking at the silly movement; founded  by the sort of people who would advise their children to shoot local authority officers, rather than show them what they have been doing lately in history or mathematics. (I think Iris Harrison knows who we’re talking about here!) Many of these early and high profile home educators were associated with, or were fellow travellers of, the so-called ’Children’s Rights’ movement in the early 1970s.


Before we go any further, here is a question for modern home educators. What sort of irresponsible lunatic would say that it is fine for an eight year-old girl to have sex with a grown man? Can nobody guess? Here’s a clue, it is the same person who also thought that children should be allowed to take heroin if they wished, work in factories, vote at the age of six and drive cars at literally any age at all. I am surprised that some readers did not get the answer to this! It was of course that great ideologue and founding father of home education; John Holt.

I know that I have talked before of John Holt and his mad beliefs, but last night I re-read his masterpiece; the book in which he sets out his vision for the future of childhood. This book, Escape from Childhood, E. P. Dutton 1974, is a vision of hell. Children are working in factories and mines, rather than being educated; they are drinking alcohol and using heroin; having sex with adults as and when they feel like. This then is John Holt’s Utopia, his vision of the ideal childhood. Not going to school is only a small part of this new world that he envisages and urges us to bring into being.

John Holt was writing from the same perspective as many of those in this country who became known as militant home educators in the 1970s, the sort of people who founded Education Otherwise. I am not at all sure that those today who speak enthusiastically of John Holt really know what he was up to and the things that he believed. This is relevant to home education in this country today, because the ideas that he espoused are still going strong among some parents. We shall be looking into this in detail in future posts and trying to distinguish this type of political or ideological home educator from the more traditional ones; those whose interest in home education is purely… educational.

How the autonomous acquisition of literacy in this country relies upon universal schooling

I drew attention a few days ago to the fact that in countries where there is not universal schooling, literacy rates tend to be low. Somebody commenting here then said that the autonomous acquisition of literacy as practiced by some parents in this country is predicated upon children growing up in a literate environment; surrounded by the printed word. Others have made this point; among them Paul Goodman, John Holt and Alan Thomas. Reference has been made to the ‘sea of literacy’ which envelops children in Britain and America, allegedly making it easy for them simply to pick up literacy informally. Not one of those advocating this way of learning to read seems to have considered the implications of such a state of affairs.


At one time in this country, few people could read. Shops had signs consisting of recognisable objects rather than words. The three golden balls for the pawnbroker and the red and white barber’s pole are relics of this; as are the painted images on pub signs. As more children attended school, so the literacy rate rose. Once schooling was all but universal, the literacy rate grew to around 100%. This means that there is printed matter wherever we look. Free newspaper and advertisements are quite literally thrust upon us, being pushed through our letterboxes. It would be hard to avoid seeing printed words each day. In a country like Bangladesh, where fewer than 50% of children go to school for five years or more, the literacy rate is below 50%. It is growing though. As the rates of schooling increase, so too does the literacy rate. There is a direct and strong correlation between the move to universal schooling and the achievement of 100% literacy in a country.

What this means is that parents in this country who choose not to send their children to school and allow them to acquire literacy informally by immersing themselves in the ‘sea of literacy’ are benefiting from universal schooling just as much as those who do send their kids to school. They are riding on the back of compulsory schooling. The universal schooling produces the literate society which is needed for the autonomous acquisition of literacy. It is rather like vaccination. When vaccination levels for measles are almost universal, the disease becomes very rare. When the levels of vaccination fall, the result is a measles epidemic. This does not of course mean that one child who is not vaccinated will get measles; merely that he still benefits from the protection afforded by all those who have been vaccinated.

It is common for autonomously educating parents to moan about the efforts made by local authorities to ensure that all children attend school. This is a little ungracious, because without universal schooling of the kind we have in this country, there would be no literate society, no ‘sea of literacy’. Their own method, that of letting their children acquire literacy informally from observing the world around them, would then be impossible. Autonomous educators actually need schools at which almost 100% of children are taught, in order  to create the correct environment for their own children to learn effectively.

Respecting childhood autonomy

I explained yesterday that one of the most beloved figures in British home education was a raving lunatic who publicly advocated small children being able to work down coal mines, drive cars on public roads and have sex with any adult they cared to. I pointed out that these views made him very popular with the more thoughtful type of paedophile; the kind of man who seeks justification for his depravity. As a result of this, I was told by one person commenting that I had sunk to a new low! The most curious comment was by Elizabeth, who felt that my post was ‘beyond the pale’. She went on to say that ‘It would not be taking a child seriously to stand by and watch while they make a bad choice‘. In other words, if her child makes a sensible and wholesome choice, she allows it. If the choice is bad, she will seek to prevent the child from exercising this choice. How this differs in any way from conventional parenting, I have no idea.

At any rate, the general view seemed to be that no parent would follow Holt‘s advice on matters relating to sex. Let us assume for the moment that this is true. If parents who advocate childhood autonomy would not go as far as to allow their child to choose to go to bed with an adult, how far would they be prepared to go down the road of childhood autonomy? An apparently innocuous example which several parents have mentioned on this blog is the question of teeth cleaning. I have seen this topic crop up elsewhere on home education blogs, forums and lists. Let us then take it that some home educating parents who allow their children autonomy do not compel them to clean their teeth. This is of course not in the same league as allowing them to have sex with adults, is it? Indeed it is not; it can be worse.

Like most adults, I was forced to clean my teeth twice a day as a child. I did not always want to, but this made no difference. Many children, particularly two and three year-olds dislike teeth cleaning and parents almost invariably ride roughshod over these objections. Not some home educating parents though. They believe that children should be allowed to ‘choose’ not to undergo teeth cleaning if they are strongly opposed to the practice.

When I reach for the toothbrush last thing at night, it is not because I have been thinking about dental hygiene and the latest research on caries. It is rather a conditioned reflex. I have been trained, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, to clean my teeth before I get into bed. This is what parents generally do with their kids around teeth cleaning. They make the child get into a fixed routine of doing the thing every night until it becomes a part of the child’s innermost being. Eventually, the child will internalise the procedure and feel guilty if he fails to clean his teeth regularly. This is excellent. The results of neglecting teeth cleaning can extend far beyond a few cavities in the baby teeth. Only recently, a piece of research was published which suggested that regular teeth cleaning is associated with enhanced female fertility:

http://acovi.com/bad-dental-hygiene-can-affect-fertility/226077/


There is also a well established link between heart disease and poor oral hygiene. This is quite apart from the obvious danger that decayed teeth can lead to abscesses in the gums and below teeth. This can bring about blood poisoning and every year, people in this country die from such things.

A three year-old child is quite unable to make an informed choice about the long term implications of failing to maintain healthy teeth and gums. He is unlikely to be concerned about fertility or heart disease. All he cares about is the momentary irritation of the sensation of the tooth brush tickling his gums. Establishing a routine of dental hygiene is vital in early childhood and must become second nature to the child. Only then will he be sure to maintain the practice into adult life. It must become a conditioned reflex, a Pavlovian response to getting ready for bed at night.

Failure to instil the teeth cleaning habit in small children, while being done on the grounds of respecting their ‘rights’ and autonomy, runs the risk of shortening their lives and impairing their fertility. This is dangerously irresponsible. This is one example of respecting the autonomy of the child which we all know is currently practiced by some home educators. There are others, equally damaging to their child’s future physical and mental heath. The failure to set the developing child’s body clock correctly for a diurnal life, caused by not insisting on regular bedtimes, for example. Under the guise of being liberal and right-on, these parents are harming their children and laying up problems for their future. Holt’s ideas about all this are monstrously wrong and following any of his advice is likely to harm children. Chuck out How Children fail and destroy any copies you come across of Escape from Childhood! The man was a dangerous crank.

The ultimate autonomy

No suggestion made during Graham Badman’s review of elective home education caused more anger than the idea that home educated children might be at increased risk of sexual abuse than those at school. Why do professionals suspect this? There are probably two main reasons. First, home educated children often seem closer to their parents than those at school. Antagonism between parents and children, common with school children and which typically reaches a climax during adolescence, is thought to be normal. When people see a teenager getting on amicably with her father, they think it is a bit creepy! One only has to look at the clip on Youtube of me and my then fourteen year-old daughter, when it was hinted that there was something unnatural about a girl of that age who seemed to be happy in her father’s company!

There is another reason why some professionals are uneasy about home education, which has to do with its ideological basis. Two of the big influences on British home education are AS Neill, who ran Summerhill school and John Holt, an American teacher. Both had strange ideas about children and sex. Neill believed that children should be free to have sex whenever they wanted to and without restriction. This was part of his school’s ethos and probably a reaction to his Scottish upbringing during the late 19th Century. John Holt is something else and since he is so popular with home educators, his ideas are still influential. He is actually very popular and influential with another minority group, which I only found out last week.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is involved in child protection; it does not matter in what capacity. She is quite interested in and not in the least hostile towards home education. During a conversation, I happened to mention John Holt’s name and she wrinkled up her nose. ’Oh, you mean the paedophile’s best friend’, she said. I was a little puzzled about this. I know the views which Holt expresses in books like Escape from Childhood, but this was the first I had heard of paedophilia. She showed me some sites advocating paedophilia. These were not pornography sites, but places where adults argue the theoretical basis for their being able to enjoy sexual relations with children. I will not provide links; I dare say that those interested enough will be able to find them. She then showed me John Holt’s name scattered about on these awful sites. Militant paedophiles seem to have adopted him as their guru! His writings provide, just as they do for home education, justification for the practice of paedophilia. This is, to say the least of it, unfortunate.

Now I don’t know whether any readers here are aware of Escape from Childhood, but I have a copy in front of me. It is not the best known of Holt’s work. In it, he says that not only should children not be compelled to attend school, but that they should also be free to have sex with adults if they wish. He explains the reasoning behind this; I don’t personally find it convincing. And yet here is a rather alarming thing. There are essentially two types of autonomous home educator in this country. One type imposes the normal rules of childhood upon children, with the proviso that education is the child’s choice and that the kid is free to choose what and when she learns. In the more extreme form, that advocated by the Taking Children Seriously movement for instance, the child has complete freedom to choose everything. There are no bedtimes, the child is not made to clean his teeth, wear clothes, get up in the morning. If he wishes, he can eat nothing but sugar. Children are completely masters of their own lives. We have had people on here supporting this type of lifestyle.

The problem is that if you give children that degree of autonomy, then it is only a short step to giving them the freedoms which John Holt supports. That is to say the ability to choose to go to bed with anybody of any age. Holt does not see why a nine year-old girl should not have sex with a forty year old man and this too is the logical extension of the arguments advanced by some militant autonomous educators. Now I have no reason to suppose that any of them actually put John Holt’s advice into practice, but the very fact that one of home education's favourite writers is also the darling of the more articulate paedophiles might be enough to raise eyebrows. When people start following his advice on childhood autonomy, you have to ask yourself how far they are prepared to go along the road which he advocates. I have an idea that Holt’s popularity with both home educators and paedophiles might be the cause of some of the child abuse notions which have in the past gone the rounds.

Pro-home education or anti-school?

I have lately been reading an interesting book which denounces school. It is called School is Dead and was written by an associate of Ivan Illich's called Everett Reimer. It is not a new book; it was published in 1971. The thesis is that schools are little more than tools of capitalist society and that they are useless for education.

Most of the ideologues of home education, those who provide the theoretical underpinning for the practice, are American. I am thinking of Gatto and Holt, the Moores and so on. Their influence though has heavily permeated the British home educating scene and this is a shame. I say this because the core idea expounded by these people is essentially that schools are bad. This negative idea, that 'Schools are bad' seems to have a lot more strength for many home educating parents in this country than does the positive one of 'Home education is good'. In other words, one often gets more of a sense of home educators in this country being anti-school than one does of their being pro-home education.

Now I dare say that a lot of this is caused by the fact that many home educating parents have taken their children out of school following a series of bad experiences; bullying, failure to meet some special educational need and so on. This sort of thing is bound to give one a jaded view of schools. I don't think though that this can be the whole explanation to the trend which one sees of a lot of parents who are not just anti-school, but anti-traditional education in general. Not only do they reject school, they also reject formal qualifications and anything which smacks at all of teaching. This attitude manifests itself in the delight which some home educating parents openly express when a paedophile ring is unmasked at a nursery, or a child dies of an asthma attack because the teacher didn't give him his inhaler at once. In other words, they are pleased about these events because it all goes to show what dreadful places schools are and how wise they have been to take their children from them.

Now I may be wrong, and I am happy to be corrected here, but I fancy that those who do not send their children to school in the first place for ideological reasons are less apt to this wholesale condemnation of school. This would be logical really. if your child has never come home in tears after being bullied by another child or humiliated by a teacher, I suppose you might be able to view school through rose tinted lenses and kid yourself that it's not that bad really. I am certainly not in the least opposed to the institution of school as such. I am aware that it does not suit everybody, which is why I am glad that parents have the option in this country to educate their own children if they wish to do so. I take it as given that children in general need to be educated in reading and writing and taught various things. Schools are a convenient and cost effective way of achieving that end. And it has to be said, most children seem to like school well enough. It does not seem to do them any harm and in most cases actually teaches them a good deal.

I think it a pity that we are compelled to rely upon Americans for our theories of home education. I have of course read the books of people like Jan Fortune-Wood, but they lack the clarity and intellectual strength of John Holt or Raymond and Dorothy Moore's writing. Alan Thomas is better, but still does not quite hit the spot. It would be good to see a British John Holt emerge. I have an idea that the anti-school, anti-examination, anti-teaching and anti-many other aspects of formal education view which is so common among home educators in this country is not doing anybody any favours with the establishment. Most civil servants and MPs, as well as local authority officers, learn about the rationale behind British home education from the internet. If they constantly see things which suggest that parents are motivated by dislike of schools and determination not to teach or enter children for GCSEs, it is liable to alarm them. Actually, it alarms me and you could hardly hope to find a more dedicated home educator than me! When MPs and civil servants become alarmed, their instinctive reaction is to restrict or end some activity, so this could have practical consequences.

The joys of freedom

Here is a quick quiz for home educators. Which well known advocate of home education was in favour of abolishing the age of consent so that adults and children could have sex without any legal restraint? No? Well it was the same one who argued that children should be able to vote at the age of three. And use heroin if they wished. Anybody guessed yet? Last clue, he did not think that there should be a minimum age for children to be able to drive a car on public roads. Well, I can see that nobody is going to get this one. Step forward John Holt, darling of the home educating parents.

I have never been a particular fan of John Holt's, regarding him as a smug windbag whose writing is unendurably prolix and twee. Still, I am aware that he is enormously popular with many parents. I had forgotten though quite how raving mad he was and it was not until I began leafing through my old copy of Escape from Childhood that I remembered another reason that I dislike him so much; the creepy way he talks about children. The problem with this book, which is not one of his most popular, is that it alternates the fairly reasonable with the completely barking. Reading it is thus a disconcerting experience; like some weird mixture of A S Neil and Aleister Crowley. Some of what he says is pretty unexceptionable, especially to autonomous home educators. For example;

'Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning, that is to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide if they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time'

There, who could object to that? (I am tempted to add, only somebody who actually cared about their child, but we'll leave that for now). Enough to say that many home educators will be applauding such noble sentiments. A couple of chapters later he suggests that we should abolish the age of consent entirely and allow any child to have sex with anybody she pleases, child or adult. He concedes that not everybody would agree with such a move, because:

'Some people have voiced the fear to me that if it were legal for an adult to have sex with a consenting child, many young people would be exploited by unscrupulous older ones'.

Well he got that right! How does he deal with this objection? Well you see it seems that we are 'caught with the remains of old myths'. He says, in effect, that only repressed people or old fuddy duddies would object to this liberating proposal. He does seem to have a bit of a thing about children though. After talking of the ridiculous idea, in his eyes, that small children might not have any sexual urges, he says:

'But we cling to this view of children for many reasons, not the least of which is that pretending they have no sexual feelings makes it easier for us to ignore or deny the sexual part of their attraction for us'.

Have a look at the chapters entitled The Child as Love Object and How Children Exploit Cuteness (The little minxes!) Here is Holt talking about an overweight ten year-old girl he had in his class:

'Now that she was no longer cute, but had become a sugar addict, fat, lazy and inactive, seduction failed more and more. But she had nothing else. Seduction was all she knew.'

Yuk! Would you want this man to baby sit for you? I find something deeply odd about a man of over fifty who refers to 'a six year-old friend of mine.' In view of whjat he had to say about the age of consent, one cannot help but wonder whether this friendship entailed his taking the kid to the pictures and then back to his place for coffee! In the chapter The Right to Use Drugs, he makes the surprising claim that:

'Most children have smoked tobacco (probably marijuana) before they are twelve years old.'

He wrote this in 1974 and I don't suppose that it was true then that most eleven year olds were smoking dope any more than it is today. He is all in favour of children taking heroin. The irrational objections to this drug are a caused by people believing more old myths.

'What really enraged people about heroin and marijuana was and is the belief that when people take it they don't want to work. So the public was sold the idea that heroin use was a terrible danger.'

In other words, just like those of us who would not want to see our eight year old daughters in the sack with a man of thirty, so too only old stick-in-the-muds would wish to prevent their children from fixing up some heroin. It's sheer repression! I won't even quote from the chapters which urge that three year olds should be able to vote and that there is no reason why an eleven year old should not take a car on the roads.

The truth is that John Holt was a very strange, some would say completely mad individual. He certainly said a few interesting things about education, if you can be bothered to wade through all the folksy anecdotes. His attitude to children in general though is appalling and dangerous.

The dark side of John Holt!

I have always had something of a soft spot for those organisations having a name which is impossible to oppose. The Pro-life movement, for example. Who could possibly be against this? What would that make you; pro-death? I have been reading up recently about another such group, Taking Children Seriously. Well I hope that all of us as parents do this! In fact I actually take children, within their limitations, a good deal more seriously than I do most adults. I find their opinions more interesting, I prefer talking to them and I have far more patience with them than I do for adults, most of whom I find very slow and uninspiring company. I have for a while been planning on writing a post about Taking Children Seriously, but usually get sidetracked. I am afraid that this has happened once again, this time by the very first words which caught my eye as soon as I went onto the website of this rather unusual movement.

A few days ago, I put up a link to an article about TCS. To summarise, those adhering to this philosophy feel that we should treat children as being rational beings in precisely the way that we do in general other fellow human beings. We should not seek to dominate them or impose our will upon them, any more than we would upon an adult. This is all fair enough. I have never had any use for those who feel able to strike children with impunity or even to grab hold of them and drag them by main force from one place to another. Regular readers will also know that my only concern in the debate on home education is the rights of the children involved. I couldn't care less about the imaginary rights of their parents! It might have been supposed that I would have felt a good deal of sympathy with the followers of Taking Children Seriously. So I did in the past, before I actually read the sort of things which David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge, the founders of the movement, have to say.

Before I go on, I must mention a curious thing, which was also touched upon in the article to which I posted a link. That is that people who follow this philosophy often comment online about matters relating to childrearing and education without specifically mentioning TCS. This is because it is a controversial approach and many people simply dismiss anybody connected with it as a being a bit of a crank. One has to read between the lines and look for phrases such as 'common preference' and 'Popperian epistemology' in order to identify those who adhere to this school of parenting.

A difficulty about Taking Children Seriously is that taking the advice of its founders could end up under extreme circumstances in killing your child. On the website is a piece by David Deutsch which explores that dilemma faced by parents whose toddlers refuse to be strapped into car seats. I have had a good deal of experience of this actually. One of my daughters would have the most spectacular tantrums about being strapped into the car seat when she was two. It made no odds. We still did it. This is because a two year old cannot possibly appreciate the fact that she might end up flying through the windscreen of the car and being killed if there were a car crash. This is quite wrong according to David Deutsch; the correct approach being either to abandon the car journey or allow the child to remain in the moving vehicle unrestrained.

Now to John Holt! I am sure that readers are dying to here about his dark side. What could it be? Was he really a secret kiddy fiddler? Did he beat his wife? Spank his children? Well no, none of those actually. It's a shame, because this might have raised him in my estimation a little. He always strikes me as the most irritatingly bland and pompous individual with his interminable, folksy anecdotes about the children he has met. Hearing that he used knock his kids about would have made him more human somehow. In fact all that he did was to express regret that some child chose school over home education. Oh and he used punishment and threats to keep the kids in his classroom quiet. Even this proved to be a shocking revelation because I can't see him doing anything of the sort and having read all his books, I am sure that I would have remembered this. In fact it was just that he used to write a big Q on the blackboard and this as the signal for the class that he wished them to quieten down a little. What a bastard! It's next door to child abuse!

I recommend readers to go the Taking Children Seriously website and read some of the stuff there. I shall be writing something a little more detailed in a day or two about this.

John Holt

I have been re-reading John Holt's seminal work "How Children Fail" and have been struck as never before by what an insincere idiot the man is. Since almost the whole of the book is taken up with his own teaching methods and the anecdotes are all of how these techniques failed to help the children in his class, it might have been more honest had he called the book, "How I Failed Children"! Probably not as catchy a title though.

For those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this book, it is a collection of folksy anecdotes from John Holts teaching days. He gives heart-warming examples of how his insight into the little darlings developed and the entire thing becomes one long and overblown case of arguing from the particular to the universal. One statement at the end of the book struck me as spectacularly foolish even by Holt's standards. he says, "We cannot possibly judge what knowledge will be needed forty, or twenty, or even ten years from now."

I truly cannot imagine anybody making such a statement and not realising as they did so that it was sheer nonsense. In ten, twenty or forty years time the knowledge of percentages and how to calculate them will still be needed, in order that people do not get exploited by unscrupulous shops and banks. Africa will still be pretty much where it is now and the people there will still be fighting over scarce resources, while those from more economically developed nations try and buy them cheaply for their own use. The Earth will still be revolving around the Sun and turning once on its axis every twenty four hours. A knowledge of history will still be vital if one hopes to understand the present. It will still be necessary to know of the Kinetic Theory of Matter if one wishes to make sense of the physical world.

I could go on indefinitely, but the point is made; we can easily set down a body of knowledge which would be of enormous use to a person in ten or twenty years time. It would not be complete and some details might alter, but the knowledge that was on offer in schools and colleges in 1999 or 1989 or even 1969 is still useful and relevant to us today. The fact that John Holt could make such a strange assertion makes me suspect that he is not particularly good guide to the world of childhood learning and that we should be a little cautious in taking what else he says at face value without delving a little deeper.

His challenges to orthodox thinking about childhood development are founded upon such flimsy evidence that it is simply breathtaking. Here he is, doubting what scientists have to say on the subject of small children's co-ordination; "My seventeen month old niece caught sight of my ball-point pen the other day, and reached out for it. It has a plastic cap that fits over the point. She took hold of it, and after some pushing and pulling, got the cap off. After looking it over, she put it back on. A good game! Now, if I want to be able to use my pen, I have to keep it out of sight, for when she sees it, she wants to play with it. She is so deft in putting it back on that it makes me wonder about all I've read about the lack of coordination in infants."

Isn't this great? He spends an afternoon with a toddler and this one incident makes him dream up a new theory of childhood development! I love it. This is no isolated example, the man seems to have spent his whole life watching trifling interactions like that between children and adults, children and their environment. No harm in that you might say, except that it caused him to create and market to the credulous and willing an entirely new and demonstrably false view of children. What is worse, there is a self aware worthiness about his writing which makes it plain that he knew, even as he was writing, that he was a wise and humane man struggling against the hidebound orthodoxy of the old and sterile theories which then held sway. Do not buy this book or give it as a Christmas present!

Was John Holt the world's most annoying author?

The above question is not meant rhetorically. Like many home educating parents, I bought a copy of "Teach your own" years ago. I didn't think much of it and stuck it in a bookcase for the next decade or so. Recently, I fished it out and had a look through it. I had quite forgotten just how truly, monumentally awful it is!

For those unfamiliar with John Holt's books, his most popular ones consist of long, rambling, personal monologues, in which he reflects on his life as a teacher. He writes in a chatty, informal style, as though he were a favourite uncle giving you some friendly advice and his books are larded with a nuggets of homespun wisdom, usually presented in a toe curlingly twee way. He sprinkles homely anecdotes around and "Teach your own" also features many stories from parents who home educate according to his wise and good principles. I have chosen a couple of pages more or less at random; pages 143 and 144 in the chapter on Learning without Teaching. Let us look at the fathers whom he quotes approvingly and see if what they are saying is worth hearing.

The first man says, "It is not possible for an inquisitive child to delve deeply into dinosaurs without wondering about, and learning, how big they were (measurements), how many roamed a certain area (arithmetic), where they lived (geography), what happened to them (history) etc." This is, despite anything John Holt might believe to the contrary, a pretty fair load of nonsense. It is perfectly possibly to spend months being interested in dinosaurs, learn their Latin names and everything about them without once learning anything at all about geography or arithmetic.

I have known plenty of kids who become obsessed by dinosaurs. I have never met one who learned how many roamed in a certain area, let alone learned any arithmetic as a consequence. The reasons are obvious. Firstly, nobody has the remotest idea how many dinosaurs did roam in a certain area. Secondly, I have been looking in all the books in the local library about this aspect of dinosaurs. Not one has anything to say on the subject. Neither is any child likely to learn geography from studying dinosaurs. For one thing there were no continents at that time, just one large landmass called Pangaea. Fat lot of use that geography would be, unless you were planning to take a holiday in the Carboniferous Era. I couldn't find anything about this in any of the books in the kids' library either.

I don't believe for a moment that any child has ever learned any arithmetic as a result of reading about dinosaurs, or any geography either! On the next page, Holt quotes with apparent approval a father who has a four year old son, "He repeats and repeats things until he has them. We put him to bed at 9pm and often at 11pm we can hear him talking to himself as he goes over things he wants to get straight." Apparently the child counts to a hundred and twenty nine constantly and keeps obsessively muttering to himself about what he has learned that day. Now call me Mr. Old Fashioned, but if my four year old child were laying in the dark for two hours counting to a hundred and twenty nine and repeating everything he had learned that day, I would be seriously concerned. Sounds like an anxious kid who needs to relax.

The book is full of this sort of thing; pointless anecdotes which are supposed to present unschooling as a wonderful way of life. Perhaps the most irritating aspect of the book is the creepy and patronising way that Holt talks about children. Here he is on page 144 talking about visiting, " An eight year old friend and her mother". I can tell you now that grown up men don't really have eight year old girls as their friends. Presumably this is actually the daughter of a friend of his. To pretend that it is the child who is his friend is at best patronising and at worst, slightly sinister. I am on excellent terms with the young daughters of friends, but if I started referring to an eight year old girl as "My friend" it would raise a few eyebrows! He is always talking about "My young friends". Yuk.

Practically every page of this book has something to annoy one. How it ever came to be seen as a seminal work on home education is an absolute mystery.