John Holt (educator) in the context of Youth rights

⭐ Core Definition: John Holt (educator)

John Caldwell Holt (April 14, 1923 – September 14, 1985) was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling (specifically the unschooling approach), and a pioneer in youth rights theory.

After a six-year stint teaching elementary school in the 1950s, Holt wrote the book How Children Fail (1964), which cataloged the problems he saw with the American school system. He followed it up with How Children Learn (1967). Both books were popular, and they started Holt's career as a consultant to American schools. By the 1970s he decided he would try reforming the school system and began to advocate homeschooling and, later, the form of homeschooling known as unschooling. He wrote a total of 11 books on the subject of schooling as well as starting the newsletter Growing Without Schooling (GWS).

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John Holt (educator) in the context of Unschooling

Unschooling is a practice of self-driven informal learning characterized by a lesson-free and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, under the belief that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood, and therefore useful it is to the child.

The term unschooling was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, who is widely regarded as the father of unschooling. Unschooling is often seen as a subset of homeschooling, the key difference lying in the use of an external or individual curriculum. Homeschooling, in its many variations, has been the subject of widespread public debate.

View the full Wikipedia page for Unschooling

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