Table Of ContentGrowing Without Schooling:
The Complete Collection
Vol. 3, 1982 to 1984
John C. Holt, editor and founder
Series Edited by Patrick Farenga and Carlo
Ricci
Growing Without Schooling:
The Complete Collection
Vol. 3, 1982 to 1984
John C. Holt, editor (1977 to 1985) and founder
Series edited by Patrick Farenga and Carlo Ricci
Printed in the United States of America
HoltGWS LLC, 13 Hume Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
Cover design by Stephen Tedesco
Book layout and design by Patrick Farenga
Copyright © 2019 HoltGWS LLC
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-7321885-2-5
Acknowledgments
This collection—just like the original issues of GWS—would not be
possible without the volunteer efforts of many people. The following people
helped scan, retype, edit, and layout each of the 141 issues of GWS; we are
very grateful for your help and diligence to see this massive project (over
6,000 pages!) to completion.
Hafidha Acuay
Tane Akamatsu
C. Tane Akamatsu
Qubsa Ali
Amy Andrews
Ellen Behm
Christine Behnen
Anne Bolger
Joey Breiannis
Courtney Anne Brewer
Jeff Brinson
Sarah Brooks
Shannon Butler
Jeff Cappleman
Amanda Carvalho
Jess Clausen
Michelle Cloutier
Jason Corcoran
Oliver & Teresa Costes
Jesse Cull
Malcolm Dow
Angie Drake
Emma Draper
Nate Dvorak
Amy Edwards
Meghan Edwards
Sheila Etches
Dawn Evans
Nada Fakhro
Michelle Feather
Aaron Fewkes
Donna Garstin
Maddie Gillespie
Emily Gonyer
Harman Singh Goraya
Elaine Greenwood
Sandra Gurton
Tracy Hall
Cindy Harasen
Brooke Haugh
Renée Herbert
Amanda Hewitt
Adrian Hill
Dagmar Hoffmeier
Emma Howitt
Viola Huang
Greg Huneault
Chris Hunt
Laura Johnson
Kirsten Jork
Deborah Joyce
Janine Kam-Lal
Juliet Kemp
Barbara Klapperich Senn
Heidi Klein
Dr. Marianne Kuzujanakis
Friedmund Labmann
Oleg Legusov
Rob Lennox
Jane Levicki
Karen MacKay
Natasha Mansouri
Gabrielle Martell
Tara McGoey
Amy Milstein
Kristan Morrison
Kristiina Myllymäki
Kathyann Natkie
Karugia Ndirangu
Katherine Norman
Jean Nunnally
Jessica Nurmsoo
Deb O’Rourke
Mercedes Oli
Dana Pelletier
Krista Tucker Petrick
Hussam Qasem
Stephanie Quigley
Colleen Raja
Marian S. Remple
Rocco Ricci
Gina Riley, Ph.D
Babette Rossj
Pabloi Sepulveda Rosso
Aleksandra Serebrenik
Thérèse Shere
Francesca Silvester
Melissa Silvestri
Tatiana Yvette Smith
Robin Stevens
Nina Sutcliffe
Kathryn Szrodecki
Dr. Gudrun Taresch
Dagmar Tatomir
Jennifer G. Taus
Stephen Tedesco
Karen Thiel
Tosh Tipler
Tracey Verney
Chun Wah Chiu
Anna Maria Wesener
Introduction
By Patrick Farenga
When I first arrived at Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine in
1981 I thought it would be a steppingstone for me to another job in the
magazine industry; instead, it became a focus of my life’s work. Being
around people who not only criticized school methods but actually took
action to help their children learn and grow in ways that schools will not or
cannot proved exciting to me. From kindergarten to college, every
educational precept was challenged and alternatives presented and I
eventually realized that John Holt was creating something new and different
in the world of education that I wanted to be part of. Unlike most schools and
corporations, John did not want or encourage slavish devotion to an
institutional mission as the primary purpose of one’s life. John encouraged
everyone, including me, to focus on our interests and concerns that engaged
us, no matter how big or small, rather than to always put our own
development aside in favor of proving to school officials that we can focus on
their interests and concerns.
In formatting and editing these issues for digital readers I realized what an
incredible individual and group effort GWS was and still is. John Holt almost
single-handedly wrote many of the first ten issues and much of his thinking
generated some incredibly thoughtful and brave responses. I say “brave”
because simply saying you were homeschooling in those days often led to
severe personal and public criticism or a court appearance, as you can readily
read in this volume. You can see a grassroots movement developing its reach,
finding allies and resources, defending its right to exist in the face of bigger,
more organized, and well-funded opposition, and celebrating the unique
power to learn and grow that is in each of us.
A note about GWS issue dates and style: John Holt didn’t want to date the
issues of GWS because he felt they contained much timeless material about
children and learning, so he decided that a simple number system—GWS 1,
GWS 2, etc.—was more useful. When we reached a certain number of
subscribers the postal service required us to print the date of publication in
each issue, so starting with GWS 31 there are accurate publication dates. But
we can only guess at the dates of some of the early issues based on the
references we see and the fact that Holt only published when he had enough
material, not because it was a certain date. It wasn’t until associate editor
Donna Richoux came on board (see GWS 11) that GWS maintained a steady
bimonthly publishing schedule.
While we wanted to make this volume as easy to read as possible by using
standard spelling conventions, the abbreviations and other shorthand John
and readers used to write and comment in the issues is preserved. We feel it
helps give you a sense of all the activity and new ideas Holt and others were
sharing in those days. The GWS Directory, where people listed their contact
info and the ages of their children, is not reproduced in these volumes, but
you can see from the many references it receives in the issues that networking
was an important function of GWS.
I had a lot of misgivings about doing this project at first. Accurately
collecting, editing, and formatting the more than six thousand pages of the
original, single-spaced GWS articles is an enormous undertaking that I long
avoided due to the amount of time and effort it required not just by me, but
by anyone who joined. I am grateful that Carlo is persistent and over the
course of several conversations he showed me that volunteers, good will, and
using some of the graduate students at the school where he teaches, Nipissing
University in North Bay, Ontario, were good, low-tech ways to tame the
thousands of pages printed during GWS’ 24 years. The manual labor involved
was enormous—every issue was essentially retyped—and I am grateful to
every typist and proofreader who helped us create this collection.
This is the first of many volumes of Growing Without Schooling; I look
forward to sharing them all and hearing back about what you think about
parents and children directing their own learning without conventional
schooling. Homeschooling has grown tremendously since Holt published
GWS 1 in August 1977; Holt estimated there might have been perhaps 25,000
children being homeschooled in the late 1970s; there are now nearly 2
million children being taught outside of school and in their local communities
by their parents. How did this wild growth happen? The answer is right in
your hands.
—Patrick Farenga
By Carlo Ricci
First, I need to thank all of the volunteers, which includes technical
experts who created solutions for us, since they all helped make this
enormous project possible. Although, republishing all of the issues of
Growing Without Schooling seems simple enough, the task required
thousands and thousands of human hours and some ingenious technical
mastery. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say that a lot of the work
was tedious, time consuming, and took a whole team of us (including over
100 volunteers) over 5 years, so far, to get to where we are today.
For many of us GWS remains one of the most inspirational and important
windows into unschooling, self-determination, and willed learning. The
insights gleaned by reading GWS are seminal. Years after it was last
published, the legend of GWS remains ubiquitous. I believe that GWS is still
the turning point for many. For this reason, I hoped that reprinting the issues
in volumes to make it accessible would be a great service. So in 2011, I
emailed Pat Farenga to ask if he is interested in republishing GWS. Of course,
he was. However, he warned me that they tried to do this before, and after
putting out one volume containing 12 of the 141 issues, they realized that the
task was enormous and required too many people hours to complete.
With the good fortune and hope in newer technology to assist us, we
decided to move forward. Initially, Pat, Stephen Tedesco (without his
technical expertise, I am not sure if we could have pulled this off. Early into
the project Stephen had to leave and we were sad to see him go), and I
thought we would tackle this project. It quickly became clear that if it was
left to the three of us, this project could not be completed. The hours required
to do what needed to be done were far too many for three people, no matter
how committed, to complete. In short, the first step required that we either
retype every single issue, or that we follow Stephen’s technical solution
which converted a hard copy of the document into a digital document so that
we could manipulate the text. We decided to follow Stephen’s solution.
Regardless, because of the format of the original issues, converting the issues
into a digital document was still very time-consuming, and required heavy
proofreading and editing, since the conversion resulted in an error-filled
