One of the first writers that many veteran homeschoolers read was John Holt. Exposure to his ideas about trusting children to learn has been enormously influential. In the 1980s Holt took a young man by the name of Patrick Farenga under his wing. We are pleased to have Patrick as our guest today.

TOS: You have been active in the homeschooling community for quite awhile. For the benefit of our readers can you tell us the ages and stages of your kids?

Farenga: I have three girls: Lauren is 16, Allison is 13, and Audrey is ten. They have all been homeschooled and have decided to go to school at various times in their lives. Right now, Lauren, the 16 year old, is being homeschooled. The two youngest are currently in school, although the youngest is probably going to be homeschooled next year. My middle daughter is looking toward going to high school. The main reason the younger ones are in school is because both my wife and I began to work full time after Growing Without Schooling Magazine shut down. Holt Associates is still around, and I'm doing a lot of work with John's literary estate and my own consulting, but it became very difficult to go from one and a half incomes to a half income.

TOS: But what a wonderful thing it is that we have the freedom to rearrange our lives as circumstances demand.

Farenga: Some people say, "How can you do that?" They never CONSIDER they could just pull their kids out and put them here and put them there. Certainly our parents never imagined doing anything like that! This is one of the many changes we are seeing. Homeschoolers have been at the vanguard questioning school, both whether to attend at all and now, also, all sorts of attendance arrangements from part time school and dual enrollment to community college. For example, my oldest daughter is taking classes at the community college and she's pretty much bypassing high school.

TOS: It's so important for us to recognize and preserve choices and not get stuck in a mold.

Farenga: Absolutely right. It's all about having options and understanding them. All too often we get in the mode of, "Tell me what to do!" This comes from our own experience of school. But once you get that power, you realize you don't have to force your child through another day of tears to get her on the school bus. Then all sorts of options open up.

TOS: I want to ask you about Holt Associates. It was started in the 1980s, right?

Farenga: Actually, Holt Associates was incorporated in 1971 as an education consulting firm. John had a bunch of colleagues who would go to different public schools and private schools, talk about his ideas and try to promote them. By the late 1970s, he realized that his thoughts were well beyond trying to reform the schools and that the schools don't really want to reform because they are doing what people want them to do-classify large groups of children and separate the winners of society from the losers.

So he decided to stop beating his head against the wall and wrote the book, Instead of Education. At the end of the book he said we should have an underground railroad to help children escape the destructive forces of school. Parents wrote to him and said you don't need to have an underground railroad, you can homeschool them! And John asked these people to tell him about this. People scattered all over the United States were homeschooling then, but they were underground and not telling anyone--except John Holt through anonymous letters. John wanted to make this more public. So in August 1977 he founded Growing Without Schooling, which was the first home schooling magazine.

TOS: I read that Holt never really thought homeschooling would catch on.

Farenga: In reviewing and updating Teach Your Own, which is the one and only specific book that John wrote about homeschooling, I have found that he felt it would grow quickly but did not believe that it would grow beyond a certain number of people. I believe that he put the number at one or two percent. The irony is that since 1981 when he wrote that book, the latest federal Department of Education statistics show that about one and one-half to two percent of the school age population is home schooling. John felt it would not go much beyond that because most parents want their children in school for any number of reasons.

Many people forget that John did not teach in the public schools. He taught in the best private schools in Massachusetts and Colorado, and he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard and University of California at Berkeley. His experience was that if things are as bad as he described in these elite places, imagine what it is like in other schools.

John's writing spoke to me. I was the beneficiary of a classical education, and I went to a prep school taught by Jesuits. I learned Greek and Latin-the whole nine yards. I know how you can get through this curriculum and not really know any of that stuff. You get a degree but the experience is concerned more with connecting with wealthy people and moving in those circles and being part of the old boy network. That's almost as important, if not more important, to be a success in those schools than your actual grades. I know a lot of kids who received poor grades who are doing phenomenally well because they have a lot of other safety mechanisms to catch them.

TOS: Can you tell us how you met John Holt?

Farenga: I was working at a bookstore in Boston that was right next to the Holt Associates office. I had no idea who John Holt was. I was going to be a teacher but my thought was that I would be a high school teacher. I had just gotten my master's degree in English. I also thought I was going to go on for my Ph.D., but after a year of graduate school I decided I wasn't really cut out for that world. But I thought high school teaching would be great. So I came to Boston to be with my girlfriend (who is now my wife), and during the time I was here I couldn't find a teaching job. They were laying teachers off and closing schools like crazy in the 1980s and I couldn't get a job, so I wound up being the assistant manager of a bookstore. That was wearing thin pretty quickly. One of the cashier's husbands worked at Holt Associates and they kept telling me about word processing, this big technology back in the early 1980s. I wanted to get out of retail work and move into office work until something opened up in teaching. They let me learn word processing. They said, "Come upstairs in the evening and type labels and correspondence, and we will supervise you and you'll learn word processing in the meantime." So I would go up there in the evening. John Holt, being a single man, spent lots of his evenings reading. This man was amazing that way. He would read three to five books a week if not a day. I am not exaggerating when I say a day. I know I have seen him get boxes of books, and in a day or two finish them. It was just amazing. It was very inspiring to be around him. Later I learned that Ivan Illich was the very same way. He would go to bed with a stack of books next to him and the next morning they would all be read.

Anyway, one night I was working in the Holt office. John was reading that night, and he walked over and said, "Who are you? Where are you from?? I said I was from New York, and he said he also was from New York so we struck up a conversation. Eventually, he asked me what I wanted to do. I said I'd like to be a teacher, and he said, "Well why?" I said I liked working with children, and John, ripping the glasses off his eyes, grabbed my attention, stared me right in the eye and said, "Oh, Pat, you've got it all wrong. If you become a teacher, you're not going to work with kids, you're going to work ON kids.? That was appalling. I thought, "How could he say that?? He just put his hand up and said, "Have you read any of my books?" At that point I hadn't. He said, "I'm not going to argue with you about it. But if you'd like to read one of my books, then we could talk about it. But I'm too old and have been over this ground too many times to start fresh.? So I resolved at that time that I was going to read the whole book.

As it happened, Teach Your Own had just come out, and I had boxes of them that I had just opened up and was putting on the shelves. So I took one home and promptly was bored. I couldn't get into it. That was my first taste of John's work. My first thought was, "This is so impractical. Who is going to teach their kids?" When I came back to the office, I told the office manager that the whole thing lost me, and she suggested I first read How Children Fail Reading that book first really spoke to me and made sense. Then I could digest Teach Your Own.

I was a single guy and didn't have kids yet. My whole thought process on raising kids was to have a hospital birth, bottle-feed them, put them in day care, etc.-the typical way that I was brought up. I saw this Mothering magazine laying around John's office and read about homeschoolers. Some of them were migrant apple pickers from New Hampshire who were homeschooling their kids while they picked apples. Along the way I met other families'symphony conductors and others' who were homeschooling their kids, and the kids were fine. But it really took a couple of years to get totally comfortable with the concept of homeschooling.

TOS: To put this in a little historical context, his work was prior to all the research on learning styles, wasn't it?

Farenga: Absolutely right. In his book How Children Learn he got a lot of flack when he wrote that children were like little scientists. They get knowledge by their experiences in the world. They aren't merely empty computer chips to be programmed by adults when they are born. He suspected that they're even learning in the womb! Now research has shown that! He spent a lot of his time around infants. He loved being around babies, watching them. He would walk around the office following three year olds, watching them empty the trash out.

TOS: You just wonder what he would have done if he had lived longer. What contributions could he have made?

Farenga: Very sad and interesting. At the time he died, he clearly saw homeschooling growing, but he really wanted to change school for everybody. Not everyone can afford to escape school. John ultimately seemed to give up on trying to actively reform the schools because he felt like he wasn't making headway. He really felt he needed a few hits in his career, and homeschooling felt like a solid home run to him.

John was an enormously popular public figure in the late sixties and early seventies. We can't imagine it in the twenty-first century, but in the - 60s he was quite a celebrity, so much so that he was once a guest on the show To Tell The Truth! That's how famous he was! The panelists were asked to guess which guest was the real author of How Children Fail. He also wrote book reviews for Life Magazine, appeared on the Today Show and other major talk shows and gave commencement speeches at major universities. In hindsight, it must have been very difficult for him to be marginalized. But what always amazed me about John's work is that he made a silk purse out of a sow's ear. He noted that the schools don't want to change, so, rather than allowing himself to become bitter, he asked, "Who is listening to me? Someone is buying my books." It was parents and a few teachers. Interestingly, one of the things we found in his files after he died was the beginnings of a book about school reform. He felt that, even if parents couldn't homeschool, things could be better if they could get the spirit of what was going on.

TOS: On that note, homeschoolers in general now defy categorization because we're such a diverse group. Because you knew John Holt well, do you think he would have viewed the modern homeschooling movement and been encouraged, amused or discouraged?

Farenga: I think he'd be pleased and happy with its growth overall in terms of presenting options for parents. On the other hand, he would be disappointed at how expert ridden it is. One of the things John Holt was always trying to emphasize, and one of the things I love about John [Taylor] Gatto's work today, is that they both believe parents can do it! Whether you're a single parent, whether you have a high school degree or not, you can successfully educate your child. One of the things that I think has happened to homeschooling, which is inevitable as it becomes more mainstream, is that the mainstream ideas sort of dominate. Now, freedom isn't an idea to help your child learn, say, origami. Most parents would not let their kids do origami for their curriculum, except perhaps as arts and crafts, but would say, "Now you need to be doing your Saxon Math!" (I have a story about origami later on). Freedom is used as a motivational technique to encourage kids to do what their parents want them to do. So I think that while homeschooling has grown, it has grown mainly in the trend of school-at-home. Unschooling has gained in popularity as well, but it still scares people. They think, "If I let my kids do what they want, they'll just do origami all day and never learn anything."

But even in the most schoolish publications, there is an understanding of flexibility as a strength of homeschooling. It's a tremendous benefit to take a break if something isn't working. That is one of the great contributions unschooling has made. It makes people aware that there any many ways and schedules for learning and lets them know it is okay to veer away from the curriculum. The deep question is, "Can you let your child learn in freedom in your home and in the community?" I find it fascinating that after 22 years in the homeschooling field every family comes up with different answers.

TOS: This is encouraging because it promotes creativity and diversity. We don't all come at this the same way.

Farenga: And that's what really bothers me when I read stuff like, "Homeschooling, if it's done RIGHT, if it's properly supervised, etc." And of course homeschooling has now gotten so big that it's factionalized. You can have all these subgroups, like the Charlotte Masons, the unschoolers, the eclectics.

One of the things about John's work is that it can be summarized into two words: trust children. But people just want to dismiss that! "We can't let our children study origami all they want,? people think. "We've got to hit the books now." The fact is that people CAN learn math through origami. Here's the story.

People say that kids have to learn, for example, trigonometry, and kids ask, "Why?" The answer most often given is that trigonometry teaches discipline and logical thought. But even if they're not going to USE trigonometry? Why go through that ordeal? The standard reply is, "To make you a well rounded individual." We have to question these things. Why isn't learning to play the piano, or learning to dance, or learning origami any less a source of discipline? If the goal is to teach discipline, work with the child's interest. My youngest is involved in karate, and she is strong willed, but she will do whatever her karate teacher tells her. That sense of discipline flows down to everything else in her life. But we think that only the things adults decide are important can be a source of discipline and logical thinking because we've developed an SAT or AP test for them.

So on to origami. What good can come of this? My editor cut this story about origami out of my rewrite of Teach Your Own; then just the other day I saw a story in the Boston Globe about this kid at MIT who made all kinds of mathematical discoveries through origami! He was homeschooled, and his father was a single dad traveling around the country as a juggler. The son picked up juggling and origami through all this, and while they were traveling they would go to different universities and discuss with friendly professors the mathematical applications of the origami problems they encountered. To make a long story short, not only is the kid now a professor at MIT, but they gave his father an office there, too, because the two of them make such a great team together. No one has really understood how he went from origami to advanced mathematics except his father and him. There's a wonderful example of following what you love-your interests. It can lead to many other things because all knowledge is connected. We think of trigonometry as separate from our lives, and it's not. But we don't need to be Swiss Army knives: that is, having a superficial knowledge of many different subjects. We can focus and hone our edge where we want, not where a committee of educationists has prescribed. It's never too late to learn!

TOS: I want to know how you, Patrick Farenga, got legal access to John Holt's writings after his death.

Farenga: Technically, Holt Associates is run by a board. When John died in 1985, I had worked with him for over four years and he had coached me from my early skepticism. I became very close with John. He had no close family, and John really felt that Growing Without Schooling should continue. Most importantly he thought we should keep the books in print, and he asked me if that would be something I thought I could do. It was several months of back-and-forth for us to figure out how to do this. This was just before he discovered he had cancer, and then he died within a year of the diagnosis. John left me as executor of his literary estate, sharing the responsibility with a board of directors, which was a very wise, thoughtful thing to do. So Holt Associates has continued to this day. It's interesting how it's gone from a consulting firm, to a magazine, catalog and book publishing firm, and now we're back to consulting!

TOS: Who knows what the future will hold! Let's talk about your books. The first one was The Beginners Guide to Homeschooling. What was the driving force behind that one?

Farenga: That book first came out in 1996. In the - 90s our office was quite strong, and we had about 11 employees. One of them, Phoebe Wells, did a great job of fielding all the calls from people who were thinking about homeschooling. Sometimes the calls would get kicked up to me or to someone else. We did this for 20 some odd years, and we never got paid for it. Some people would call us up and keep us on the phone for two hours! I came from watching John Holt do that. Trying to handle those calls more efficiently was a difficult corporate change. People said, "You give too much away! No wonder you guys are burning out!" The fact was, in the early 1980s, we were the only game in town. If you called up, you had a fifty-fifty chance of getting John on the phone, right off the bat! Ultimately, Phoebe suggested that I just write a book so she could just tell people that all the answers they wanted were right there in the book. That was the actual driving force: to deal with the basic questions that people had. In the original edition I wrote and designed the pages to look like an owners manual for a car. I was trying very hard to make it as user-friendly as possible. In fact the first edition was a mere 64 pages. These days, homeschooling books are thicker and thicker and thicker! Is homeschooling really that hard? Do you really need that much information to teach your own? It bothers me because John's thoughts and my own thoughts about education are simply that it's not that hard!

TOS: And...your brand new book, Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling.

Farenga: The original Teach Your Own has been out of print in the United States since 1998. My editor suggested updating it. The original Teach Your Own is a wonderful book about why and how to homeschool, but it is also a book about political action. In the rewrite, the biggest cuts and edits I had to make were all the court cases and articles that John had cited to give parents the confidence and the legal ammo if they needed to homeschool and officials questioned them. That is such a moot issue now! john's wisdom here was to avoid going to court at all costs. If you really need to do something, go to the legislature because you are more likely to have success in the legislature. Once again, history has shown him to be correct. We've frequently gotten stalemated or hurt in the court, but in the legislature homeschoolers usually come out smelling like roses. So I was really impressed by the breadth of John's arguments in Teach Your Own So many books just want to focus on the six different ways you can homeschool, or eighteen different ways to do phonics. Instead, John dealt with the larger picture, the whole issue of education--even truancy and the legal issues of where children can be during school hours. One of the things that leapt out at me as I looked at John's work was that John came to the conclusions that he did about homeschooling because he viewed children as social learners. It's so ironic that the biggest criticism against homeschooling is that it isolates children. School is isolating kids! They're not allowed to talk except under very prescribed situations. What happens at home? They interact with the children and adults around them, and THAT'S socialization. Children are born curious and want to learn about the world in their own wonderful and effective ways. If we tried to teach children to walk and talk the way we try to teach them to read and write, we'd have talking deficit disorder and walking deficit disorder.

TOS: That's for sure. So, your new book, Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling. Will it be available in bookstores?

Farenga: Yes. Teach Your Own will be published by Perseus Books, and Harper Collins will be the distributor. So we hope it will be widely read and distributed.

TOS: It was really a sad day when Growing Without Schooling ceased publication. But you continue to be involved with consulting at Holt Associates. Tell us about that.

Farenga: I"m doing a lot of consulting and editing for businesses and educational publishers. I'm also involved in marketing for the Clonlara School and Paths of Learning Magazine. And I have my independent writing and speaking as well.

TOS: Do you offer consulting services to individual homeschoolers as well?

Farenga: All the time. Susannah Sheffer and I both consult with families, and I also consult with businesses.

TOS: For the benefit of our readers, that contact information is below. I want to thank you for taking this time to share with The Old Schoolhouse. We are grateful that you are dedicated to preserving the legacy of John Holt for the homschooling community.

Holt Associates

PO Box 89

Wakefield, MA 01880-5011

info@HoltGWS.com

www.holtgws.com

Christine Field is TOS Magazine's Senior Correspondent. Visit her website at www.HomeFieldAdvantage.org