John Holt on The Phil Donahue Show discussing homeschooling 1981 

How you finding the work of John Gatto and have you read the essay Towards the Deautrction of Schooling

Shawna.....most people ignore history at it's/its core......health, education, entertainment, astrology etc, were all taught either as a household (Village home) or, when the elders gather the youth and teach them. BIG head people found a way to corner and make them markets, now we are conditioned that, schools as we know it, is the best.

Not realising, the reason it's a shitty world is because of sending them there.

Exactly

Exactly!!!

Check out the videos on this channel. Many of them are of John Holt speaking about children, parenting, learning, unschooling, etc. John Holt was the founder of Growing Without Schooling, the organization that operates this channel.

Oscar Sharkslayer Remember this is the generation that had to do with this type of attitude. They had to be more resilient. I don't think many realize how much has changed.

08:50 I wondered if I needed to hear this but the point made there was incredible

I was homeschooled in the 80s and turned out just fine. :)

@Maggi N: I have no doubt that homeschoolers turn out fine nearly always. Outcomes much better than at school (research says). I am curious if you like the structured variety of homeschooling, or believe in unschooling. With my kid it is more than obvious: if he likes things, he learns things. If he does not like things, there is no force that could make him. This makes me wonder how other parents succeed in directing kids (unless by bribes or threats). For example, is it possible to make the kid read books in the era of computers? Is it possible to teach languages without moving to the target country?

@@oscarsharkslayer I believe in Unschooling. Let your child choose their, let them master their chosen interests. That master leads to other mastery. Be your own example, by learning things that interest you!

@Lynn Mayhem Yes there is, there always has been. But we will not allow that. Homeschoolers are one of the strongest groups of people who are standing up for their rights. It's over 2 million strong now, and they're going to have one hell of a time stopping it.

I work at a library and am in contact with MANY home schoolers. I would home in this day and age. It has become very organized with home schooling families coming together for activities and classes are online.

@@donnaleeclubb119 love that. Our librarians absolutely love our homeschooling family. 🥰

When I show this video at conferences the commercials are always talked about a lot!

Fuck you. This is bullshit

I laugh in their face and tell them that the horrible socialization which happens in the schools is one of the reasons why my kids are home-schooled.

not to mention the potential of the internet now to arrange socialization, meet ups etc

It’s funny how people think school is the only place to learn socialization. And I’m sorry, but the kind of socialization in school is not really the kind I would want my children to be a part of....bullying, excluding people who aren’t in your “group” etc. Where as many homeschoolers tend to be around people of all ages and all backgrounds.

Thank you for saying that!

@@truthbetold4350 Or the lack of socializing. One gets in trouble for simply speaking in the classroom and having a thought of their own!

43:30 except for the time I spent in school my whole life has been a learning experience

Incrível, não é? 40 years later and the discussion is exactly the same!

Thanks for your comment! I want to note that most homeschoolers don't teach their children subjects they aren't familiar with. They find online classes, tutors or classes from local colleges to help their children learn subjects they don't know anything about. Homeschooling parents act more as general contractors, finding others to help their children learn, rather than as all-purpose teachers.

Yessssss people Looked and sounded so real. I miss it

what went wrong? Globalization?

Remote learning is not at all like homeschool.

Randy, in Teach Your Own, which came out the same year this was taped, there are references to cases in KY, CA, and MI that declared certified teachers do not produce better student outcomes than uncertified ones do. Typically, teachers in private schools are not certified as educators, but have a degree in the field they teach. If you want the actual court citations, they are in the issues of Growing Without Schooling. You can peruse free scans of all 141 issues (#1-40 contain lots of the court news that John refers to in this video) at www.johnholtgws.com/gws-issue-archive/

@@Johnholtgws Thank you!

@@randysheckler763 tempted to watch champions league football highlights but going to browse your channel instead

I initially thought so too but he was obviously hands off with the blond teen. I remember the show when I was a child and this was the first time I'd seen him from an adult perspective - he was great and a good job of respecting everyone while keeping the ball bouncing.

Arviant, if you want to make Indonesian subtitles for this video I will be happy to upload a copy of this video to the HoltGWS RU-vid channel and add the Indonesian text you create. I'm surprised we can't just add them to this video and let people choose which language they want the subtitles in.

@@Johnholtgws so we upload it together or just on HoltGWS channel only? thx in advance for your respons.

No. They really are not crazy. In this day and age, home schooling is very well organized. Through the local city government such as the library, there are home schoolers who have their own teen after school activities provided such as games that are socialize with each other. There is a teen book club. The home schoolers are very well educated.

I hated my years in high school. I went from healthy to burnt out. I went from loving to sing to thinking I had a horrible voice (thanks choir teacher... Guess what, I was the choir president and one of the supposedly "best" singers). College was a rest from the pressure, competition, constant performing. So, so glad I homeschool my 6 beautiful talented children who are interested and passionate about everything they learn.

Good for you. Not everyone has the same experience. I personally hated school. I hated everything about it besides band/color guard & my small group of friends (that the majority of them I don't even talk to anymore). After I graduated high school, I taught myself photography & I became a small business owner ALL ON MY OWN. No college. I bought books & did my own research. I learned so much better & discovered I actually liked to learn new things. The school environment was not a good learning environment for me. It's definitely not for everyone.

School is like tying kids against their own free will to the back of one big, ugly truck. The person driving the truck chooses the destination and the kids have no say as to where they will go. The driver steps on the gas and all the kids tied to the back have to walk or run at the pace of the truck or else they will be dragged if they don't keep up. Many kids who cannot tolerate such treatment and who refuse to be apart of the chain gang are dragged by the school truck until they are no longer recognizable. The ones who can't keep up are labeled as 'retards' and 'special needs' and become the 'losers' who don't fit into the tied up crowd. The ones who can keep up are the 'mainstream' kids who are given treats and patted on the head for complying. The ones who go too fast wear themselves out until they slow down to fit the ordinary mass of Children. Public schooling is a form of involuntary mass incremental sadism that disregards each child's peculiar needs for their own choice of life experience and unique adventure. School is also like forcing everyone to wear the same size pants or shoes even though people are of different shapes and sizes, and the ones who cannot fit the standardized size (curriculum) are degraded and class categorized as persona non grata. A real Education, metaphorically speaking, is giving kids their own vehicles so they can travel at their own speed to their own destination or goal. They can take care of their own vehicle and take as much time exploring new terrain as much as they would like. Teachers are only useful as guides to start off the driving experience, and children do most of the work and practice themselves without having their hand held and dragged or slowed down. The more they learn on their own the more self respect they have. The less they learn on their own and the more they are forced to depend on the truck to drag them to where they don't want to go, the less self respect and hope they have as individuals. Homeschooling is the key, because it produces family raised human beings who can produce their own lives, not state raised consumers who buy other people's false promises and advertising pitches. School teaches kids, very subtly, that they are genetically predetermined, statistically averaged and publically measured chair units who ought to follow the prescribed life formula of their "expert" captors. That can hardly be considered an education. "School" and "Education" are mutually exclusive terms. One is externally jailed reward and punishment, intimidation and flattery within an environment of deranged, institutionalized isolation. The other comes from within, from self knowledge and from practicing what we love and concentrating on it as long as we would like so we can grow organically to live our own good life, rather than getting dragged mechanically to fit someone's ideal of Utopian, state approved perfection.

@@mr.r2362 go shit ya pants

@@elgeneralxx only if you clean it up for me, little peasant. Lol 🤣

@@elgeneralxx walking mistakes like you shouldn't be wasting their time commenting, go play with yourself in the basement, kid.

@@mr.r2362 i actually was stuck in the basement until moved out. Pooped pants 🤣

The point of home schooling is not to let children become complacent about real life. Many people choose home schooling, especially in this day and age of the 21st century for different reasons. I work with home schoolers everyday. Some parents travel for work and they don't want their children disrupted with having to enroll in a different public school every year or two. And by your analogy, public schools get out for three months vacation, two weeks for Christmas time (winter break). I wish I had a job that did that. LOL. So school already is unrealistic in regard to working life.

no but you can always leave and you're getting paid to be there

Find another job, or find a reason to go to work. That's the whole point.

Well, he was sick with melanoma at the time.

Not sure in the film chameleons street he successfully impersonated a doctor as have other people ..surgeon in fact

In this day and age of computers, it is easier than ever to home school children successfully. Back then, not sure. Also, as for religious reasons, religious schools have been around for DECADES, Catholic and Jewish and Baptist schools as well as interdenominational schools. Those kids are no worse for it, overall. Some people don't want to "leave that crap" (as you put it) out of their kids daily lives. Also, the job situation has drastically changed since the 1980's. Many, many, people do not work for one company 30 years and retire. That, in fact, is almost a thing of the past. Many people are contract workers who move about working in different cities every 2 years or so. Many parents do not want to pull their children in and out of school constantly.

You can’t compare doctors who operate on people with teachers. Also to your statement about some kids being nuts. Lol.. do you know how many kids in schools are failing classes, never go to classes or don’t bother learning? Okay.. yes because 1 teacher is responsible for 20 kids!

While I agree Children deserve the freedom to choose what they want to believe and learn throughout their lives without being forced to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or any other kind of religious person, it nevertheless stands that the mass Compulsory public school system as we know it does exactly what it was set up to do by Industrialists, Utopian Social reformers, Anglo-Saxon Philosophers and Social Darwinists: it schools, drills and trains habits and attitudes into kids which produces excellent, obedient consumers and workers for a mass corporate economy and a stratified income class system; it teaches kids to stay in their place if they know what's good for them; it divides kids against each other by "socialising" them into discreet classroom units who derive their self worth from peer opinions and authoritative rewards and punishments, carrot and stick; it does not teach them to become entrepreneurs, leaders and inventors. School does not teach us Practical adult skills and work knowledge in the form of one on one apprenticeships at a young age, it just teaches us how to stay stuck in a chair and pass tests and copy notes off a blackboard while we parrot the teachers commands and the textbook chapters, while not thinking critically for ourselves about how all the subjects taught synthesize together and are of a whole piece instead of a fragmented smorgasbord of petty multiple choice factoids to mark off on a memorization quiz. School trains us to be trapped, passive, frustrated crowd pleasers and teacher approval chasers, not solo adventurers, real world risk takers and mature hard workers. The "curriculum" of a school classroom is not freely chosen, it is state standardized and enforced externally and the Individual child has no leverage to choose their own curriculum or to focus on one particular interest for any extended period of time or at their own individual pace. The implications for teachers are also heavily constraining: teachers have very little leeway to provide their own material and life experience in a class period due to the demands of top down administration which is delivered to a warehouse mass of bored, irritated, trapped, stuffed together kids who have no time to gather meaning in a period lasting roughly 45 minutes before a bell ringer or buzzer breaks their natural concentration. If the child tries to show independent inventiveness or quirky eccentricity, they are humiliated, sarcastically castigated and "put in their place" as an example to other kids to follow orders and conform like good class programmed chair props. The "Socialisation" at schools is basically kids raising each other with confined, artificial campus cliques formed out of the need for group survival, much like prisoners form prison gangs for identity and survival in a penitentiary. If one kid refuses to conform, they are mocked, ostracised and humiliated into acting "appropriately" much like prisoners punish somebody for not obeying the cell block code. Let's go back in history before this factory modeled bell warehouse was forced on our kids. Before the beggining of twentieth century, or perhaps more often before the civil war, the people of colonial and early Federal America treated young people from roughly 7-15 years old as young adults because the small, local farm and merchant economy demanded whole family, whole village involvement in local affairs unlike our specialized, contracted, expert worshipping Industrial economy of today; it was all hands on deck so to speak, everyone from Children to old people were involved in the maintenance of our early republic, kids had actual mentors and exposure to the intellectual classics of European Enlightenment Genius and American thought: the so called "kid", "teenager", "brat" or "adolescent" as we now call them would be engaged in actual hands on work like how to track, how to hunt, how to build a house, how to stand up for their rights, how to engage in public exchange, how to do public speaking, how to debate, how to think dialectically, how to write with extremely high proficiency and how to think critically for themselves. These young people would be included into the general community as we can read in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, where he was working for a family business at 13 and teaching himself every kind of written knowledge available in New England at that time. The writings of Thomas Jefferson should give us insight into what a real Education does for a human being and the travels of Alexis de Tocqueville in our early years as a nation are deeply insightful into the potential and Practical genius of young children and adolescents keeping our Democracy for the people and by the people. Not to mention the many examples of elementary school, middle school, high school and college dropouts who rose to become fast food business founders, computer and electronics business successes like Steve Jobs, Steve Wosniak, Michael Dell, and a host of other names and professions too lengthy to put on this comment. With this information in mind, I would call trapped peer Culture and modern pedagogy a synthetic, highly unnatural, historically abominable experiment of radical proportions, because it doesn't educate, enlighten and enrich: it schools, brow beats and intimidates into class complicity and specialized wage slavery. Children should be free to choose what their faith is and what their life goals are; they should not be denied access to the larger community and to mature, experienced adults who can teach them skilled professions that suit the child's desire or temperament, and I do agree that many homeschoolers are wrong to train their kids to be parrots who can't think for themselves, but the homeschoolers I know within my own family and friends do nothing of the kind. They give their kid freedom to roam in nature, to be with other homeschooled kids and to interact with actual musicians, actual tradesmen, actual working class people. They give the kid time to be with themselves and to teach themselves to read, write and to arithmetic with the basic skills given by mom and dad. To trap kids away from the world and to tell them they should walk, talk, dress, think, act and feel like other kids and that they should pass impractical, overly abstract SATs to have a "good life" is absolutely insane, unrealistic and deranged, it is not preparing them to be free, responsible and Individually competent leaders and business founders, it damages children, limits their options severely and makes them infantile, incompetent in finding their own purpose for living and scared to initiate their own risks to build their own enterprise, out of fear of disobeying the holy "expert". I say these things with all due respect to both homeschoolers, charter schools, private schools and people in the mainstream public schooling community. And we must understand that in the day of our founding fathers, there were small capacity school houses which houses kids of mixed ages from the local community, instead of trapping them in a huge warehouse with other age graded kids neatly sorted like human vegetables or Industrial cattle. Plus the teachers in those days actually had the incentive to make their own curriculum and keep in intimate contact with each parent, who by the way was involved with local constitutional town maintenance and politics, the parent of those generations weren't fast paced experts whizzing around in cars to their office job separated from their kids development in the schoolhouses. Kids in those days were Practical assets to the homestead, the family business and the family farm, they weren't yet taught to look at themselves as financial liabilities who burdened their specialist business networking suburban parents. We must understand that the structural make up of the system of Compulsory schooling we have in our country is set up to serve the supply /demand dynamics of the mass economy we have built since the civil war. Even more frightening, the schools we see all around us are actually Prussian in their design; the Prussian system ( the same system which gave us the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the NAZIS in ww2) was designed to produce highly trained workers, soldiers and civil servants for the Germanic political and military state , then Horace Mann helped push through the importation of that system on the east coast in the 19th century. Just as many of the members of the Nazi SS and their constituents pleaded not guilty at the Nuremberg trials and said 'I was just following orders', so to we train our kids to have that same, highly disciplined but thoughtlessly obedient Prussian, teutonic, mentality of "I'm just following orders" at their desks or in their cubicles or machines and then we call ourselves free Americans? That is definitely a betrayal of our American charter to build free, self governing, free thinking, imaginative citizens of our constitutional republic. I'm not blaming teachers either, for they are trapped in the same system that traps the kids in order to make their living. This mass schooling Institution doesn't serve free people, strengthen the family or the kid's talents. It makes us less free so we serve commercial management and mass production machinery, while ripping the extended family apart, while teaching kids to disrespect tradition and their parent's values. School makes kids eerily socialist and collectivist in their attitudes. I would recommend whoever made it this far on my comment to look up a man named John Taylor Gatto. Phil Donahue is a decently balanced referee between audience and the homeschoolers, he interprets both sides but of course with his customary blood boiling comments to excite both positions. John Holt is quite spot on and I respect his views highly, but Gatto's research goes thoroughly deep into this issue as well. He's also a good introduction into this issue of modern forced schooling.

To be more direct: School teaches WHAT to think and WHEN to think it to please the state and to give job security to the teachers employed by the state. It does not teach us independent entrepreneurship or high level classical thought. It doesn't teach us HOW to think or WHY we think the way we do or the different ways of thinking which expand our minds limitlessly. SATs are a measure of obedience and memory, nothing more, nothing less. The school trains most of us to become a narrowed, incomplete specialist who performs one job function over and over until retirement or death. It is anti American. It teaches wage slavery and consumption, not personal inventiveness and independent production. The American dream is to contribute to our communities and form our own private enterprise, to be our own boss and share our wealth with our family and locality as young as possible so we can enjoy a solid, responsible and prosperous life. So much for that. Were not taught to rise and that the sky is the limit, were taught to remain in our class position if we know what's good for us. Gatto says it best when he stated "Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid."

(Giving TheBookWorm1718 a high-five)

OUT view that's an ignorant statement.

"Homeschooling is more religious then anything...." Not true at all. In a 2012 DOE survey of parents who homeschooled their children, the reasons they gave as most important in their decision to homeschool included concern over the school environment, with such factors as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure (25 percent); dissatisfaction with academic instruction in schools (19 percent); desire to provide religious instruction (16 percent); desire to provide moral instruction (5 percent); desire to provide a nontraditional approach to education (5 percent); and the child having a physical or mental health problem (5 percent). In all, 91 percent of those surveyed cited concern over school environment as one of their reasons. So only 16 percent of homeschooling cite religion as the primary reason for homeschooling.

"...School is more than Academics, it is about learning to socialize with others." True, school is more than academics. It's about learning to socialize very poorly for most students. No where else in society, except in lawless urban ghettos, are petty thefts, assaults, bullying, and other anti-social behavior tolerated by the authorities. By contrast, homeschooled children have a much better social life, generally speaking. In 2000 the Peabody Journal of Education published an issue focusing on homeschooling, nothing that "research on the academic achievement and social adjustment of homeschooled children abounds," and that "research studies indicate that homeschooled students perform well in terms of both academic achievement and social and psychological development". Resarchers have reported that the homeschooled participate in more extracurricular activities, have a more diverse range of social contacts, and have higher scores on socialization, social maturity, living skills, and communications tests than public schooled children.

OUT view oh please. What other ignorant comments do you have?

Ehhh, John Holt's crazy frizz-top isn't much better :\

@@MsNooneinparticular Well, He was sick with melanoma cancer at this point in his life.

grow up, lack of makeup is normal

I find most homeschoolers are able to articulate and support there ideas with valid cohesive thoughts. Not only are many of our kids not being taught basic ideas or self-directed learning, but they also are often not encouraged to collaborate, be kind, share, respect others, moral values, honesty, compassion..... It is okay to disagree; it's what opens us up to different viewpoints allowing us to learn and grow as individuals and as a community. However, it is not okay to attack someone on the basis of their "clothing, hairstyle...). We are capable of being better than that.