GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING
39 As we could only expect in a big and diverse country like ours, the home schooling picture is mixed. Most families are having it easy, some hard. On the whole, though, we seem to be winning much more than we are losing in our struggle for respecta bility and legitimacy. Legislatures seem more and more of a mind to make home schooling explicitly legal, but with some restrictions. If we can avoid wasting our time trying to get rid of all restrictions, we should be able to use our energy and our grow ing political savvy to insure that such restrictions as there are are minimal, reasonable, and easy to live with. At the same time I would say that the number of school people who feel that they can and should stamp out home schooling altogether contin ues to decline, while the number who are ready to live with it, and even to give it strong support, continues slowly to rise. In short, I feel that the odds are continually improving that families who want to teach their own children and who go about this the right wa~ are going to be able to do so with little or no trouble. What the right way is, we have of course discussed at length, and will contin ue to discuss in GWS. In a nutshell, we should try not to attack, startle, or terrify the schools, and to show them instead that we are smart, seri ous, reasonable, courteous, resource ful, and determined . The response to our article about starting a tax-exempt corpora tion called Friends Of Home Schooling (GWS #38, p 7) has been encouraging. May we ask that you look or look again at tht article and tell us your thoughts. We plan fairly soon to write about it to all former sub scribers; perhaps a number of them, who feel that they no longer need GWS, will want to help us keep it go ing for others who do need it. The article I wrote for The Pro gressive, which they, rather to my regret, entitled "How Teachers Fail," was reprinted in the May 14 issue of Newsday, a very large newspaper that serves Long Island. They gave it the much better title, "Educational Meta phors That Crush Kids." In Ithaca not long ago I saw three performances of Ishmael Wallace's new musical play - his third, all produced (wonderfully') at the First Street Playhouse. Except for Vita Wallace and one other child, the cast was made up of adults, most of them experienced singers and actors (it was Bob Wallace's first appearance on stage), and all of them excellent. The play was very funny; some of the Saturday night audience were laughing so hard I thought they might have to be carried out, or given oxygen , or something. Nancy Wallace's wonderful home
schooling book, BETTER THAN SCHOOL, sold over 1000 copies in its first three months, which is very good for a book by a new auth o r, published by a small company. This will be a word-of-mouth book, so if you have read and liked it, please tell others about it (or buy it for them ) . By the way, the publishers have no immediate plan to put it into paperback. Speaking of books, we just had an order, from a public school in California, for one each of every book on our list' A splendid e xample for everyone. Dr. Raymond Moore (Hewitt Research Center, PO Box 9, Washougal WA) has started to publish some cur riculum materials in reading and math, and would like to have home schoolers act as distributors for his material. People interested should get in touch with him. We have had several foreign vis itors in recent months. From Sweden came myoId friend Ake Bystrom, who arranged my tour to his country in early 1982. From England came John Farrow, Co-Director of Kilworthy (in Devon), a community of teen-agers and adults; and later, my friend the physicist David Deutsch, who wrote us (GWS #29) about apprenticeship as a way of learning advanced physics, and with him his two young friends Ben and Rudge Brown. --- John Holt
JOHN HOLT'S COMING SCHEDULE July 12, 1984: Holt Associates Open House (2nd Thurs. of each month). July 19: A. A. Cleveland Confer ence, College of Ed., Washington State U., Pullman WA. Contact Denis Conners, 509-335-5023. Sept. 8 (tentative): Connecticut Home-Schoolers Association. Contact Laura Pritchard, 203-634-0714. Sept. 28: Sunrise Session, D'Youville College, Buffalo NY 14201. 8 AM. Contact Robert DiSibio, 716 881-3200, ext. 6112. Anyone who wants to coordinate other meetings or lectures around these times, contact Patrick Farenga.
"YOUNG CHILD REN" SUPPLEMENT We are pleased to announce a new publication available from our office, "YOUNG CHILDREN: NATURAL LEARNERS . " This is the first-ever GWS supplement, made up of letters from GWS readers and articles by John Holt. This is not a collection of old material reprinted from GWS, but all-new stories which we simply have not had room to print. The entire supplement relates to children from birth to age 6 - living with them, watching them learn, coping with their demands, teaching them (or trying to'), the important role of play, deciding whether to send them to pre-school or school, and more. One article by John Holt describes how a six-year-old inter twines work and play in our office. Although many of the letter-writers do not expect to send their children to school, this GWS supplement is not specifically about home-schooling,-- and could be read and enjoyed by many parents and others who are not inter ested in home-schooling as such. So this could be the perfect gift for your friends and relatives, as a way of introducing them to our beliefs about the way children learn, and to give them many great ideas on what they can do with their children. For now, the price of this sup
plement is $1, including postage. As soon as I send this issue of GWS to the printer, I will be putting togeth er the supplement, which will be 8 pages in the same 3-column format as GWS. So it will be available by the time you read this. We may print sup plements on this or other topics in the future, depending on the abun dance of material, our time con straints, and the success of this one. So, for all of you who have told us you just can't get enough of GWS here's your chance to get a little more' You won't find this kind of encouragement and support anywhere else. --- Donna Richoux
NEWS FROM CLONLARA Pat Montgomery sent us the April issue of Home Educator, the newslet ter for her HOME BASED EDUCATION PROGRAM (Clonlara School, 1289 Jewett St, Ann Arbor MI 48104). Some inter esting excerpts: ... The number enrolled in 1978: 3 students; the number in 1983: 632 students . ... In the current school year, 37 home school families were contact ed by local school officials. Two were threatened with a court suit by those officials. Each of the 37 con sulted with HBEP and let us handle the contacts. None of the families had to consult a lawyer; none was taken to court . . . . Out of a total of seven high school-aged stud e nts who completed the HBEP program in 1983, each went on to college or university (two to business college, three to community colleges, and two to universities). ... Clonlara School Based Educa tion Program does provide standard ized tests, the California Achieve ment Test, for home school stu dents ... We administer the test in either of the following ways: (1) the entire packet, including the adminis trator's manual, is sent to the fami ly, the teacher then administers the test after becoming familiar with the manual and with our own written ex planation of procedures; or (2) ... a teacher from an alternative school near to the family's home administers the CAT to the home schoolers. The entire packet is then returned to HBEP ... An explanation of the scores and each interpretation is then sent to the home school. The cost is $20 per family (it does not matter how many children a family has enrolled in their home school) ... In January, the "rear portable" classroom here on campus was re arranged to accomodate home schoolers from the area. Actually some families come from as far as 60 miles away to attend the sessions here .... All of
WHAT'S INSIDE - Wisc. law: 2 --- Other legisla tlve news, 2-3 --- Court news: 3-4 --- Early grad: 4 --- Longtime homeschoolers: 5 --- Open Houses: 5 --- Organizations: 5 --- Success stories: 6 --- Peterson/Changing: 7 --- Reluc tant husband: 7 --- Work: 8-9 --- Jamaica: 9 --- Mexico: 10 --- Elitism: 10 --- OK to be ordinary: 10 --- Fighting: 11 --- JH on diSCip line: 11 --- Shyness: 12 --- Duro case (NC): 13 --- Lewis Thomas/Language: 13 --- Learning stories: 14 --- Hart/Brain: 15 --- Return to school: 16 --- Radosti/Ed. School: 17 -- School grads: 17 --- Wallace/"Seattle Sue": lB --- Math (real life, fingermath): 18-19 -- Computers: 19 --- P.E.: 19 --- Writing (Pen pals, cluster): 20 --- Books: 20 --- Aerial photos: 21 --- Trials: 21 --- Art (Tips, Egypt weavers): 21 --- Music (Instruments, Suzuki, synthesizer): 22-24 --- Language tapes: 24