“I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for four talks I’ll be giving in Portland, OR on March 20 (click the sidebar if you want more information about this engagement). I wanted to include some new videos and perspectives for these talks and I started rummaging through my files from my days with John Holt and found a bunch of video and cassette tapes of talks by John. I’ve started watching one, a four-hour VHS tape of John speaking to homeschoolers in Spokane, WA. I’m not sure of the date, I think it is 1983 or 1984, given references John makes to some of the kids who came into the office then. I hope someone who views this, or some of the other segments that will be posted, will remember at least the year. Let me know if you have any guesses or ideas that would help date this video.

I am about two hours into this video and I’ll certainly post more of it as I watch it and become more adept at extracting video from tape and then uploading it to the web. However, there are so many classic John Holt lines, and some surprising comments John makes, that I couldn’t wait any more to start sharing it with people. I think for much of the public there is a perception of John Holt as a wide-eyed radical who romanticized childhood. I hope this, and future clips, will show John as the quiet, plainspoken but deeply thoughtful man he was. This short segment also shows Holt’s deep empathy with children, a quality that is sorely lacking in all our discussions of education today. John’s analysis of how children struggle with pronouns is radical when you consider how few current day teachers would recommend, as John does, to leave the children alone and let them figure it out for themselves. Indeed, in my mind I hear a chorus of educators clamoring as to why they must intervene instead of following Holt’s advice:

“They will develop learning delays!”

“They’ll fall behind their class!”

“You are guilty of educational neglect because you should be making your children learn how to correctly use pronouns!”

Of course—and I see this in this particular clip—John could be quite passionate about certain things, in particular about how children learn and what parents and other concerned adults can do to help them learn. As you will hear John say, “I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

This particular lecture is in a setting John enjoyed being at: speaking with a group of parents and children in a comfortable setting. In much of the tape I’ve seen so far you can hear lots of babies babbling and children playing in the background and, often, John will stop speaking and comment on what he sees or hears from the children in the audience.  I also found cassettes of radio interviews John did with NPR and the BBC, as well as tapes John made of himself playing the cello or speaking in foreign countries. The cassette tapes are usually very good quality recordings, either professionally done or recorded by John himself, who was quite an audiophile. However, the video tapes aren't the greatest quality. Nonetheless, I decided to work with them to get them online because there just isn't much video of John and I hope people can look beyond the grainy images and scratchy sound to experience, or re-experience, John Holt and his observations about children. I look forward to sharing these with you as I move more of these recordings into digital formats.



Comments

[Stephanie Nystrom]

Thank you for posting this video - this is the first time that I have heard John Holt speak! I have read all his books, but you are right, there aren't enough videos of him.

[Deb S.]

What a terrific metaphor...pulling up their roots to check their growth. It drives home the point quite nicely. Thanks for posting these, Pat. We're out here...learning, watching, and growing, too.

[Cathy Koetsier]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you Pat! John Holt is my mentor in more ways than I can ever express. He has challenged me and provoked me and changed me and made me more sensitive to my children and... and... and....
What a privilege to see this footage of the man. More please!

[Ute Mitchell]

Pat, thank you for speaking at the OHEN Convention today. I thoroughly enjoyed your workshops, and attended every single one of them. What you had to say, only confirmed that I was on the right track, and now I also have a few more books on my reading list.

THANK YOU!

[Tunya Audain]

Happy Birthday, Pat Farenga:

Thanks for bringing forward videos of John Holt. I remember seeing him there in Spokane having driven down from Vancouver, BC, Canada. I remember John when I first talked to him in Mexico when we both attended discussions with Ivan Illich of Deschooling fame in early 70s,

This is the conversation that I had with John one day in January, 1972:

John: Now that you have completed teacher training, where are you going to teach?
Tunya: I didn’t get training to teach in a school. I took it to teach my own children.
J: Is it legal”
T: Yes, I’ve studied the legislations. It’s possible across North America and England. Parents are to cause their children to obtain an education at a school or elsewhere. It’s this “elsewhere” clause that allows home education.
J: Well, at least you’re now qualified to teach them.
T: I also found out that you don’t need a qualification to teach your own children.
J. What about socialization? They’ll be different.
T: Kids should be individuals. They’ll have plenty of friends from the groups we belong to. Besides, there is a lot of negative socialization in school …
J: What if they want to go to college?
T: They will probably be strong, independent learners and will have an advantage to transfer in …
J: SMART CITY!

5 years later John started Growing Without Schooling and the rest is history ... the movement grew ever since.

One of our blogs is currently discussing homeschooling here: http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/blog/read/give-home-schooling-a-chance/

One poster made this offhand remark: "Who cares? They will always be an insignificant minority." To which I replied:

Home educators and home learners will NEVER be an insignificant minority.
They are the leading upholders of freedom and individual liberty today!
They are the single-most important movement today against the steady, encroaching growth of the state into our lives.
It is worth repeating the important conclusion reached by John Holt, one of the world leaders in home education:
“Today freedom has different enemies. It must be fought for in different ways. It will take very different qualities of mind and heart to save it.”

[Helen Hegener]

The date was April, 1984, at the Family Learning Network's first conference/gathering. I was supposed to be there, as I was part of the group which arranged the event, but my dad suffered a major heart attack the evening before and I ended up driving to Seattle (350 miles away) instead (Dad recovered from that one).

I did get to attend a talk and workshop John had given the day before at Eastern Washington University, for a teacher's group. I believe that was filmed for one of the local television stations and those tapes might still be available.

I actually got to spend quite a lot of time with John during that visit, as he was staying with my friend and Family Learning Network coordinator Nola Evans, and Nola, another friend, and I drove John to the University (40 miles west of Spokane) and to another talk in Spokane that evening. I remember that John was so interested in everything, asking questions about whatever caught his interest. And he had his lovely travelling cello with him, and played a bit for us before we headed off to the University. That was special!

[Pat Farenga]

Helen,

Thanks for dating this for me! I love your observation about John being interested in everything—so true! You can see and hear it often in this video as he responds to balloons he sees up on the ceiling, a child playing with a door, etc. That travel cello you note was a prized possession of his. He loved it dearly.

Pat