I'm sitting with three teenagers who have recently left school to begin learning at home and in the wider world. On the table in front of us lie notes about possibilities - ideas, wishes, plans for further investigation. I've scribbled down, "Call homeless shelter; find out about marine biologist," in response to Anna's brainstorm of things she would like to do or learn more about. Adrienne and I have agreed to meet next week to talk about the essay she is working on. Ariel says that she wants to work with someone who can help her see what it means to think mathematically, rather than just how to complete math assignments, and I've recommended someone for her to call.

Though these kids have been homeschooling for a few months, they are still becoming accustomed to the freedom, to the heady realization that education can be about figuring out their own goals, rather than figuring out how to meet demands that don't make sense to them. I am struck again and again by their enthusiasm, their interest in learning, the number of things they come up with when they are asked what they want to know more about.

As we scrape the last crumbs of chocolate cake from our plates, our conversation turns toward their friends who are still in school and who are more often than not unhappy there. They say they want to let these kids know that homeschooling is an option for them.

Speaking for the many skeptics, I offer a common criticism of homeschooling: "Some people might say that you are special kids and that homeschooling can only work for kids who are as self-motivated as you are. After all, think of all the interests you've been telling me about..."

"But I wasn't like this at all last year!" Ariel interjects. "I wasn't the kind of kid you would think would be self-motivated. I didn't do that well in school, and I didn't have all these things I wanted to learn about."

The others agree. "Oh yeah," one says, "if you had to go by how I acted in school..."

"It's not fair to look at kids in school and say, oh, they're not motivated, oh, they're not good at this," someone else adds, "because maybe they would be a lot more motivated under a different system. The thing about homeschooling is that it's so different. I wish people could understand that."

"Why didn't school work for you?" I ask.

"No one was paying attention to what I really needed," Adrienne says. "And it was really hard for me to take myself seriously there. I was always doubting myself."

"It's hard to fit in there, but you have to fit in," Ariel adds. "School pits kids against each other."

"And you're cooped up all day, under those lights," Anna says. "It felt like we were being punished, that's what I always used to feel, like we were in there as a punishment."

Some people would call this adolescent griping. Why do I listen to these kids, this growing crop of new homeschoolers and their companions, the long-time homeschoolers who have learned outside of school for years, and feel that they are some of the most important education critics of our time? Why do I feel that these are the voices the school reform movement needs to hear?

John Holt wrote in 1970, "Every day's headlines show more clearly that the old ways, the tried and true ways, are simply and quite spectacularly not working. No point in arguing about who's to blame. The time has come to do something very different."¹

People learn things everywhere, in all places.

about ways in which people, young and old, can learn to do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work without having to go through the process of schooling. In starting this newsletter, we are putting into practice a nickel-and-dime theory about social change, which is that important and lasting change always comes slowly, and only when people change their lives, not just their political beliefs or parties.²

Growing Without Schooling, as Holt said elsewhere in that first issue, was "to make people feel less helpless," because it would show them that people could change things for themselves, could create new solutions in their own lives without waiting for an entire revolution to occur. Of course, the changes they did make would then be inspiring to others and would demonstrate that "something very different" was indeed possible.

They don't need the promise or threat of grades to make them learn.

Imagine that I am traveling into the future in a time capsule, and that I come to rest, five hundred years from now, in an intelligent, humane, and life-enhancing civilization. One of the people who lives there comes to meet me, to guide me, and to explain his society. At some point, after he has shown me where people live, work, play, I ask him,

"But where are your schools?"

"Schools? What are schools?" he replies.

"Schools are where people go to learn things."

"I do not understand," he says, "People learn things everywhere, in all places."

"I know that," I say, "But a school is a special place where there are special people who teach you things, help you learn things."

"I am sorry, but I still do not understand. Everyone helps other people to learn things. Anyone who knows something or can do something can help someone else who wants to learn more about it. Why should there be special people to do it?"

And try as I will, I cannot make clear to him why we think education should be, must be, separate from the rest of life.

This was my first vision of a society without schooling. Since then I have come to feel that the deschooled society, a society in which learning is not separated from but joined to, part of the rest of life, and is not a luxury for which we can wait hundreds of years, but something toward which we must move and work, as quickly as possible.³

This parable of Holt's is developed within the context of a much deeper and more detailed analysis of the function of schooling in society than I can give here. The story is useful, though, because it gives a vivid picture of what we are aiming for. It invites us to think about what stands between our current assumptions and those of that mythical future guide.

When I think about Holt's conversation with that tour guide, I think about the guide's bewilderment, his lack of comprehension. Though of course I feel myself to be trying to increase people's understanding, I'm also working toward a time when many of the things we now do to children and many of the ways we now think about children's learning simply won't make any sense.

Young people are capable of deciding what is important.

Homeschooling is important because of what it rejects, but it is equally (or perhaps more) important for what it reclaims on its own terms. Teachers, help, schedules, organization - these are not school things in themselves. They are school things when someone assigns the teachers, tells the teachers what to teach, gives the students no say in the matter, makes the help be compulsory, imposes the schedule according to institutional rather than individual needs, and so on. But when the teachers are chosen freely, the help is requested (and can be refused), and the schedules and organization serve real needs or goals, then these concepts mean something quite different.

Holt's tour guide wouldn't understand the need for grades and other external motivators, either. In a world where everyone learns all the time, people are learning on their own steam, for their own reasons, and they don't need the promise or threat of grades to make them learn or to tell them how well they did. Growing Without Schooling once asked home-schooling kids and teenagers to describe situations in which they had to do something difficult or frustrating as part of working towards a larger goal: "The pronunciation is difficult," a fifteen-year-old homeschooler wrote about her efforts to learn Spanish, but she kept practicing because she really wanted to learn the language. "Although it would have been easy to quit, I decided not to," a thirteen-year-old wrote about his determination to remain on a challenging swim team because of his ambition to become a lifeguard. And after describing how hard she had to work to learn to sight read music, a sixteen-year-old lifelong homeschooler said, "I do things that are difficult, or that I really don't like, for the same reason I do anything else: because I've decided they're important."⁴

This is what our tour guide would understand, but what so many schools fail to appreciate. Young people are capable of deciding what is important or necessary, and once they have decided, they are capable of working much harder than we imagine. Schools, after failing to give children the chance to decide what is important to them and to understand the relationship between their chosen goal and specific tasks, then conclude that children are lazy, no good, unmotivated.

One of the consequences of thinking that people learn only in schools is that the culture ties up more of its resources in schools than in libraries, museums, public art facilities, community centers, and other places that are accessible but not compulsory and not restricted to one age group.

Most of what I know I did not learn in school.

John Holt took an unusual approach to this problem of living in a culture that evaluates people according to school credentials. Having already acquired a couple of those credentials (though not as many as most people thought) before he developed his critique of schooling, he refused to include any mention of his schooling in public descriptions (on a book jacket, for instance, or on other occasions where such information is ordinarily given). Instead he said, "I have come to believe that a person's schooling is as much a part of his private business as his politics or religion, and that no one should be required to answer questions about it. May I say instead that most of what I know I did not learn in school, or even in what most people would call 'learning situations'."⁵

John Holt's approach here is characteristic of his attitude toward social change in general. In a letter he wrote during the late 1970s he said:

During the 1960s, many young people were talking about revolutionary changes in society. Paul [Goodman] used to say to them, "Suppose you had had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical." Very good advice. The trick is to find ways to put your strongest ideals into practice in daily life. I don't mean talking to other people about it, or saying, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we all did this or that." I mean doing it right now. It is interesting, absorbing, fascinating, satisfying, and useful. You don't have to wait for a hundred million people to agree with you, you can start right away. And when you find that you are able to do something, the very fact that you can do it means that anyone else who wants to can also do it.⁶

This is what I try to do, and what, in a sense, homeschoolers are doing as they simultaneously try to live in a way that makes sense and in so doing illuminates the possibilities for all of us. It's true that we are not anywhere near the kind of society that Holt's imagined tour guide lives in. But what would it look like? How would people live? What would no longer be true or necessary and what would remain? Homeschooling is about figuring out answers to these questions and then - as Holt suggests - about trying to live as though those changes had already happened. Circuitous? Maybe. But it's the most direct route I know to the world where that tour guide lives.