Articles > Education outside the norm - a discussion

Education outside the norm - a discussion

It is the uniformity produced by institutional schooling - school 'uniforms' being the external symbol - that Ivan Illich, in his devastating critique of schooling, 'Deschooling Society', sought to highlight. Indeed, Illich believed that the primary purpose of institutional schooling is social control. Any pretensions of 'education for all' are eclipsed by the desire of Governments to produce a malleable, homogeneous work-force - a population who will readily submit to authority, who will not rock the boat by questioning the values of Society and will allow those in charge to deploy them at will.

In my last job, my leaving was precipitated by me questioning the morality of treating people as a commodity, alongside the resources of money and property. How many 'Personnel' departments are still left? Very few - they have become 'Human Resources' departments - and how convenient it is for companies to be able to treat humanity as a simple resource!

And, increasingly, education is treated simply as a sub-standard form of white-collar vocational training - that is, training young people for the jobs which seem to be becoming increasingly rare in our ever more automated society.

So education, as practised in learning institutions, seems to have the twin aims of training children in the skills that are required by employers and training them to be happy working for those employers.

This is at odds with the aims of the many pioneers of free education. As Erich Fromm put it, in his foreword to 'Summerhill', by A S Neill: "The aim of education is to work joyfully and to find happiness".

Can these seemingly diametric opposites be brought together? Can we train young people for jobs as well as nurturing in them the ability to be happy and joyful?

The answer, it seems, must be - No.

A child's right is an education which allows him to pursue whatever activity he wishes, at any time of his choosing. The only checks should be rules mutually agreed between the child and his fellows - both adults and other children. As far as safety is concerned, the current, vast panoply of supposed safety measures for children can be largely ignored. Water, fire, stairs, kitchens, open windows, knives and other tools are of no danger to a confident, self-regulated child. The only real dangers to a child are the worries and expectations of catastrophe foisted upon the child by over-protective adults.

Anything other than this amounts to coercion and oppression - serving the controlling, authoritarian neuroses of adults and stripping away from children their very rights as human beings.

Furthermore, if we are trying to bring up our children to help create a better world, it is vital to think about how best we can encourage them to be -

• Confident enough to not have to express the same opinions as those around them;
• Able and used to questioning received opinion;
• Able to think differently, way outside the boundaries of conventional thinking on any relevant subject.

Such children need an education which builds on, and makes full use of, their vast capacity for learning - nurturing the seed that has been allowed to grow at its own pace and is already showing the promise of adulthood.

And it is their education or, more specifically, how and where they are educated, which is the key to this. Simply speaking, the world will not change unless the people in it change and until people's values and priorities become aligned to a more sustainable and gentler world view and way of life.

A 'conventionally' educated child spends (including the ridiculously onerous homework which they are forced to do) the best part of every day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year in school – from the age of 4 to the age of 18. This is a vast part of their childhood and a part over which, if you send your children to a conventional school, you will have absolutely no control. You have voluntarily ceded control to an establishment - and government - whose ideals and values might well be very far removed from your own.

Despite what all Governments fondly imagine, change does not come about by means of legislation or bossy, pseudo-paternalistic 'initiatives'. True, lasting change comes about by people themselves making a reasoned and informed decision. And they will not make a decision which goes against the grain of conventional thinking, or which is opposed to the views of their peers, unless they have become used to doing so.

And we should certainly never delude ourselves that we can trust a child's teacher to have anywhere near the same values or ideas as we do. Teachers have a bizarre dual role as educator and jailer: they are entrusted just as much with keeping a child almost literally imprisoned in one of our enormous modern schools as with thrusting into him or her as much subject-specific information as possible. So any values which a teacher might have which happen to be somewhat aligned with ours will – of absolute necessity – take a very distant second place to maintaining 'discipline' and what passes for education.

But there is so much more to it than what type of school, or even what type of education we should choose for our children. It must never be about 'education' in the limited - subject-delimited and exam-orientated – way with which all conventional schools are so obsessed.

People who have a deep-seated desire to treat the world properly will inevitably also have the same desire to treat other people properly and – crucially – this will stem from the desire to also treat themselves properly – physically, emotionally and spiritually. And that desire will be most deep-seated when it was formed in childhood.

To this end, it is absolutely vital that we stand back and let our children have their childhood to themselves. They need to be able to stare into space for long hours, if they want to; to learn things when they are ready, and want to; to not be labelled as children 'with learning difficulties' if that time happens to be later than other children?

Whenever children come into contact with the conventional, they are forced to be herded together with large numbers of children all their age - the 'peer' group with its petty intrigues and jealousies, its insiders and outsiders, winners and losers. They thus lose (or never gain) the opportunity to help younger children, or learn from older ones - learning co-operation and respect, rather than competition. School essentially removes their ability to interact, on a day-to-day basis with adults who are neither parents nor 'authority figures'.

When your children are outside the school system, you can allow them to just 'be' – a state where the intimacy and silence of childhood are encouraged: when in control of their own lives, children often like to play with just one or two friends and young children need vastly more time by themselves than most of them ever get.

Children should be allowed and encouraged to do things for the pleasure of doing them, not to escape a penalty, gain some kind of spurious award, obtain praise, or to do it better than another. One of the major negative results of school is that children lose their self-esteem.

To quote John Holt who, having been a teacher, subsequently became a passionate advocate of home learning and identifies here one of the foundations on which schools' destruction of a child's self-confidence is based:

Children who don't attend conventional schools tend to be much more socially mature and emotionally stable than their schooled friends, who are dependent on their same-age peers for language, attitudes and taste. And it is maturity and emotional stability which are prerequisites for the free thinker, that is a person who is not afraid to express ideas or hold values which are different from the norm.

As people who want to help create a different – better - world, it needs to be recognised that bringing up our children to be 'good, upright citizens' is completely at odds with that desire. There is nothing wrong with being a good citizen, but society's ideal is to produce people who won't rock the boat - conforming, non-questioning, fearful of authority, happy to go along with the crowd, needing others' approval, not instinctively knowing their own path in life.

John Holt again [from 'How Children Fail']:

And, whilst we might choose to demonstrate or march 'against globalisation', 'against greedy bankers', 'against the climate crisis' or whatever, these actions are accepted by those who we have allowed to be in control of our lives as manifestations of being a 'good citizen', albeit an irritating one. Such actions can be easily absorbed and controlled as necessary evils in a 'free' society.

How much more challenging it is to simply - with our personal actions - state: "we are in control of our lives; we entirely reject your world view and societal structures". Parenting - and educating - our children in a different way is a profoundly challenging political statement and a powerful way of exercising our real power to change the world.

So mainstream schooling should be considered as almost the opposite of the type of education we desire for our children. But what is the alternative and - even - is there an alternative?

Despite what most people tend to think, there are alternatives to mainstream schooling and there is no need to feel that our children will somehow lose out on education if they don't attend a conventional school – or don't go to school at all.

Received wisdom is that children need to be 'stretched' and that, the more you do this, the more they will achieve at school. The corollary is that, if they are not pushed at all, they will not succeed at all.

However, the list of famous people, living and dead, who thrived from not going to school is impressive: Yehudi Menuhin, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, the Brontes, Beatrix Potter, C S Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Agatha Christie, Noel Coward, Doris Lessing, Jessica Mitford, Gerald Durrell ... to name but a few.

It is hard to know what would have happened to these talented people under other circumstances, but it is my belief that the absolute key is that they did not have their love of life, learning and discovery destroyed by 'traditional' schooling.

It's not that I don't want my children necessarily to 'succeed' by the normal measure of society, but – to a much greater degree - I want them to be free and happy.

As parents, whether or not we think our children are being pushed too hard in education depends on what type of world we feel we need to prepare them for and what type of world we might want to help to create, by bringing them up differently. Parents who might call themselves 'practical' or 'realistic' would argue that children need to he prepared as early as possible for our thrusting, aggressive, competitive world.

We all try to do the best for our children. But surely we are labouring under a delusion if we hold one philosophy about the world and our children and then provide an education for them that effectively prepares them for something entirely different?

Mainstream schooling also holds within itself perhaps the greatest of all educational confusions. This fundamental confusion is between education, which should be a continuing, organic process of discovery (in other words, the 'life-long learning' which the mainstream talks about, without really meaning this at all), and examination (or, come to that, any type of non-examination assessment) which is a finite set of goals, requiring limited skills (with those skills normally being in simply how to pass those exams).

Our teachers told us that one thing we must not do is attempt to pass exams by cramming, the week, or night, before. But anyone who has successfully passed a series of examinations will know that the opposite is the case - the one sure way of passing is to stuff our heads full of information and regurgitate it onto the exam paper. Much of it is forgotten very quickly, but that is of no consequence when the goal of a pass has been achieved. The successful examinee is the person with a large capacity to memorise information on a short-term basis.

And the amount of time expended by schools on this goal is particularly absurd when, for example, a child can actually be prepared for GCSE Maths with as little as 60 hours concentrated, self-directed work.

One mother I spoke to was convinced that, during her little girl's nine months at school, she had learnt nothing that she wouldn't have learnt outside school. She was particularly appalled that everything was geared to the Government assessments in reading, writing and arithmetic skills and that absolutely nothing else seemed to matter. Her daughter has already been categorised as a below-average reader and begun to view herself, at least partially, as a failure.

Worse still, as David Elkind notes, in his classic book 'The Hurried Child':

John Holt provides a telling comment on this in his last book, 'Learning all the Time'. He talks of Leon, a young black man of about 17, officially labelled as virtually illiterate:

The book which he was holding up was 'Why We Can't Wait', by Martin Luther King. As Holt points out, it is a book "full of long, intricate sentences and big words", but Leon had "struggled and fought his way through that book in about a month or so".

There is much talk of how we are 'failing our children', if we don't ensure that they have, at the very least, adequate literacy and numeracy skills. But are we not also failing them if education, from the very earliest age, is reduced to coaching them in how to pass tests or examinations? And if we tell them that these basic skills are necessary, but do not give them any sound reason why they should attain them? Why does a three year old need to learn his numbers when he has nothing which he needs to count?

True education, by contrast, is a process - it has no goals, being an end in itself. It is a process which begins in the womb and will only stop when life itself stops. It recognises that our potential is limitless and that each person's learning is a unique, individual process which, if contained within the confines of school, must falter and eventually cease to exist0.

And the conventionally-trained teacher- one who has learnt to teach, rather than facilitate learning, whose function, rather than doing with the child is to do to the child – will always hinder this process.

A mainstream school - not process, but goal-orientated - cannot fail to take the learning process, extract its vital organs and replace it with a carefully constructed, life-like model. A model which gives the appearance of a professionally facilitated education but, in reality, is empty and devoid of intelligent life.

But what is the alternative? Surely a child cannot learn unless he is taught? And surely the only people who can adequately provide this teaching are 'teachers'?

It was in the years immediately after the turn of the 20th century that radical philosophers began to examine this process. Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw included education in their swingeing attacks on the mores and conventions of Victorian society. Maria Montessori opened her first 'Casa de Bambini' (Children's House), in the slums of Rome, in 1907; Rudolf Steiner opened his first school in 1919; Summerhill School was founded, in 1921, by A S Neill.

In their different ways, all of these radical educational pioneers were pointing the way towards an education for an independent, free-thinking person. A person who knows that he can put his mind to anything and can, of his own volition, master any skills he needs, in order to achieve his aims in life. But all of their ideas were so challenging to educational orthodoxy that, in the ensuing century, just about none of what they were saying has found its way into mainstream educational thinking.

The views of Steiner, Neill and Montessori – in particular - are all of vital interest, not least because they all thought that the school system was so bad that there were no parts of the current system that they wanted to keep in any respect. It is well worth looking at exactly what they were saying, and how well their ideas might fit in with a principle of 'education to change the world', particularly Montessori whose ideas, I feel, might be unjustly written off because of the well-heeled middle-class connotations of the 'Montessori Nursery'.

Montessori's central belief was that children should be allowed freely to choose between activities, with no interference from adults. Her intention was that her methods could be applied to children of all ages. I think that modern day parents and teachers might consider that there is something cute, fey and mumsy about what passes for the modern 'Montessori Nursery School'.

But contrast these sometimes rather sad little institutions with Montessori's characteristically acerbic and incisively angry attack, in 'The Secret of Childhood', on the whole regime of adults' control of children:

And, in 'The Montessori Method', on the subject of discipline in schools, she emphasised that:

Not long after that, in 1921, Summerhill School was founded by A S Neill. His vision was a school where children would be free to attend lessons whenever they wanted and where they would be free - indeed encouraged - to play out their fantasies and subconscious desires. The only authority was that of the community - a child's fellows, whether adults or other children (primarily at the large weekly meetings attended by all the teachers and children, where each has an equal voice … and vote), would provide approval or disapproval.

The child, seeking to become a valued member of society, would modify his behaviour, at his own pace, and would not suffer moral disapproval or physical coercion - he was free to become whatever he might wish to be.

Summerhill School still exists. But it is so threatening to mainstream educational ideas - indeed to the mores of mainstream society - that any article or documentary on the school inevitably concentrates on the aspects which are sure to win widespread disapproval: the children are aggressive, swear a lot or are portrayed generally as the type of nightmare, 'monster' child from which parents can be guaranteed to recoil in horror.

But the official school inspectors, in their 1949 report on the school, were to confirm the success of Neill's methods:

There have been some severely condemnatory official reports over the years, but an OFSTED (the UK 'Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills') report from 2007 rated the overall quality of the school as "good", with an "outstanding" rating in 2 areas ('Helping children achieve well and enjoy what they do' and 'Helping children make a positive contribution').

The interesting thing about this report is that the inspectors in 2007 were saying virtually the same as their colleagues said nearly 60 years ago:

And, 17 years later, A the most recent (2024) report stated that "Summerhill School continues to be a good school" and, under the heading "What is it like to attend this school?", the inspectors could not have been more complimentary, when they wrote:

It is clear from his writing that Neill wanted no less than to change the world:

From those three reports, and everything I have seen, read and heard myself, it pretty much looks to me like he succeeded in that. This is an incredible model for bringing up children who can make a real difference to the future of humanity and our world.

Much of the work of Neill and Montessori was geared to the needs of young children, for they believed that it is our youngest children who are most damaged by conventional education. As did John Holt:

In recent decades, 'Montessori' nurseries have been proliferating in well-off neighbourhoods. But does the Montessorl approach really present a useful alternative? Or does it just serve to provide, as one disillusioned father put it to me, "crammers for the yuppie fast-track"?

Maria Montessori believed that the young child's medium for learning is play, which she referred to as the child's "work":

A central tenet of Montessori's philosophy is that, left to their own devices, with the right materials and in a beautiful environment, young children will choose order over disorder - they will quietly and delicately move around the classroom, selecting their play objects and will happily clear up after themselves:

By contrast, Neill believed that young children will inevitably choose chaos and disorder. They have no respect for personal property, will never clear up and will spend many years playing aggressive and noisy "gangster" games, before they, at around puberty, start to consider others and begin to desire order and routine:

He was understandably scathing about Montessori's ideas:

Furthermore, since the children's play is regarded as a form of work, when a child uses the materials to further his fantasy play, this is to be discouraged:

At a Montessori school which I visited, any behaviour which moved away from the regulation Montessorian calm and order, towards an - equally natural - childhood playfulness was nipped in the bud with: "you're being silly" or "who's making that big noise?" Calmness and order are thus regarded as the child's natural states and anything else as a potentially damaging aberration. A dangerous assumption for anyone involved with children and one with which Neill fundamentally disagreed:

I can only say that, in my own experience, young children love both order and chaos! They are happy to lift up and tip out a box of toys and can sometimes be prevailed upon to help to clear up - when they do so, it is with a meticulous attention to detail. But their everyday play is noisy and aggressive, interspersed with periods of quiet constructiveness.

So, with children of my own, I can't help feeling more in sympathy with Neill's analysis than with Montessori's.

However, there is no denying that the humane, gentle and non-directing approach which Montessori advocated is very attractive. The irony is that, because Montessorian reading, writing and arithmetic teaching is so successful, it is easy for a Montessori school to start satisfying the needs of ambitious, pushy parents, rather than the needs of children. This is a problem which a Montessori teacher I spoke to particularly identified with the upmarket London establishments.

Whatever later interpretations have been made of the fundamentals of Montessori's ideas, her central idea was that children should be provided with suitable materials for play and allowed freely to choose between activities, with no interference from adults. The child should only move on to another activity when he is ready.

Although the so-called 'didactic materials' play a central part in Montessori's educational philosophy, it is perhaps this aspect that creates the main weakness, rather than strength of the approach. Fine, if we want our young children to be taught literacy and numeracy skills at an early age. If we don't, they are a distraction and can constrain children too much, within a system that otherwise places so much emphasis on freedom.

The underlying issue here must be that, if we extrapolate observations of children in a particular environment, set up by someone with a particular idea on how children behave, onto all children in any environment, we will be forcing our children into a model of our own making.

As Alison Stallibrass, in 'The Self-Respecting Child', her classic study of young children at play, notes:

Spontaneous undirected choice is a key aspect of the Summerhill approach. When I visited Summerhill, as part of my research for this piece, I spoke to Zoë Readhead, A S Neill's daughter and (at that time) the principal of Summerhill: as far as she is concerned, GCSE results are "very good", with a lot of students getting good grades. This is particularly interesting given that the lessons are entirely voluntary and that the students can choose to have a go at an exam, without teachers telling them that they are not ready. .

Whilst Neill's ideas have had far-reaching effects, providing inspiration for just about every other 'free school' project, the option of sending your child to Summerhill itself is limited. And, of course, it is a boarding school, which I feel has its own major drawbacks.

Looking further afield, to the USA, there is one - very successful - free school - Sudbury Valley. Founded in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968, by Daniel Greenberg and his wife Hanna, the school (according to Peter Gray, in his 2013 book 'Free to Learn') has inspired over 30 schools throughout the world.

Their vision was based on the fundamental principle that children needed complete freedom if they were to flourish and that the school should be governed equally by all its members - pupils and adults. Students from pre-school through high school age explored the world freely at their own pace and in their own unique ways and were responsible for their own paths to adulthood. There were no 'teachers', as such, just knowledgeable adults who could assist the children in various areas, if needed.

To quote from the Sudbury Valley website:

A short article by Samantha McCarthy, poses the question in its title: 'Sudbury Schools: Is There Such a Thing as 'Too Much' Freedom?' and answers her question with a very clear 'No':

The author concludes:

In Peter Gray's book (referred to above) he refers to several surveys which involved talking to ex-pupils, so Ms McCarthy's conclusion will have been based on that information.

There appear to have been no similar surveys of Summerhill ex-pupils, but the similarity of the two schools' educational approach suggests that we can safely assume that their comments would be similar.

Viewed alongside the comments of the OFSTED inspectors quoted above, it is clear that this type of approach pays huge dividends: it turns out socially-able, confident and motivated young people, who can turn their hand to anything they choose and lead a successful and happy life.

The founders very clearly drew much inspiration from Summerhill (including, in particular, the weekly meetings), but I was only able to find one mention of Summerhill on their website, in a footnote to a recent article. Despite their apparent lack of honesty in acknowledging that, one 'simple fact' remains: Mr and Mrs Greenberg were standing on the shoulders of a giant, who had already created that "unique combination of liberty and responsibility" half a century earlier.

There are a few schools around the UK with similar ideals to Summerhill and Sudbury Valley, not least Sands School, in Devon, where children are "given the right and responsibility to direct their own education", as well as every other aspect of the school's day to day running. But such schools are few and far between.

The Small School, also in Devon, was set up by Satish Kumar and, not surprisingly, has a holistic – and admirably small-scale - approach to education. The school has a maximum of 40 students, thus creating a necessarily human-scale environment which: "allows for flexibility and individual attention so that a student's education can develop to meet their individual interests and aspirations." [from the Small School website]. This is, superficially, a very small-scale version of a conventional school, where the children can learn a wide variety of subjects. However, the level of commitment expected from students and teachers and the spirit of mutual co-operation which they see as being "essential for the well-being and development of The Small School and the education we offer" means that this is fundamentally different from a conventional school. Not least, students and staff meet together at the beginning and end of each school day, so that any issues and concerns can be addressed.

The main drawback, of course, is that this requires parents to actually go through the endless procedures which are required to set up such a school. I know people who have tried to do this, but have simply run out of energy and ended up sending their children to the local comprehensive. As far as I can tell, the school is no longer in existence, a casualty of that bureaucratic burden.

So the principal alternative to mainstream schooling for most people, apart from home education, has become the Steiner, or 'Waldorf' school. Rudolf Steiner had his own views about child development, which he used to devise a complete system of education. He was particularly keen that the journey of childhood learning should be given just as much importance as the goals to be attained.

The Steiner education movement maintains that Steiner attained a unique knowledge of the essential nature of childhood and that the system which he devised could therefore be applied to all children, whatever their age or ability.

There is no doubt that Steiner schools display a humanity and gentleness sadly lacking in mainstream education. And, in terms of achievement, both academically and artistically, these schools achieve results way beyond our national average.

The Steiner system does not push that hard. Instead, it encourages, along a well-defined - and very well-trodden - path and the children seem to enjoy themselves. They establish an exceptionally good rapport with their teacher - perhaps, indeed, this is the key to Steiner schools' success.

This rapport is greatly valued and is enhanced by a key aspect of the education: from ages 6 to 14, the class teacher, assisted by other teachers in special subjects, guides a class of children throughout those eight years.

But there is no question that we are dealing here with a belief system, of almost religious dimensions. For example, at age 7, a child is deemed to be ready to write and read (in that order) and, since there is such a strong belief in the working of the group, children are taught literacy from this age. I raised, with a Steiner teacher, the issue that perhaps some children might not actually be ready for literacy at the prescribed age of 7. She breezily dismissed this, telling me that there was "no point in a child strutting around doing his own thing". And, whereas Montessori believed strongly that young children love order, for the same Steiner teacher, this assertion was, quite simply, "a fact".

I had a lot of experience with the Steiner philosophy and the associated educational and play materials, when I was the web designer for Myriad Natural Toys for many years. There is certainly something very different about these toys and materials, but it did rather feel to me that there was a particular way of playing and a particular way of doing art and crafts which was, for me, just too systematic - and dogmatic - for some of us to stomach. Maybe we'd prefer our children to be, for example, drawing in a more free way than the somewhat identikit beeswax crayon drawings that adorn the walls of a Steiner classroom? And maybe, dare I say it, we might think that the weird stuff about angels smacks of a pseudo-Christian cult?

That having been said, our experience with young people who have been educated at Steiner schools has been extremely good. For many years, we have been hosting volunteers to help in our very large self-sufficient vegetable garden. In particular, a German brother and sister came to help (at different times) when they were 18 - they were very mature for ther age, thorough, diligent and good company. And our sons met a couple of young men whilst snowboarding and discerned a great fellow feeling and a similar outlook on life. It turned out they had been to Steiner schools.

So those schools are clearly doing something right and are, therefore, far better than conventional schools at turning out well-rounded young people.

However, never one to mince his words, A S Neill, with his deep-seated mistrust of education systems, disliked much of Steiner's practice:

The organised and directed nature of Steiner education produces both its main strength and its major weakness. Unlike Montessori schools, where much is left to the individual inclinations of the teacher, with a Steiner school - or kindergarten - you know exactly what you will get. If you believe in or, at least, are reasonably happy with the approach, you can be assured that your child will receive an education along those lines.

But, despite the assertion from Rudolf Steiner that "our highest endeavour must be to develop free human beings who are able to impart purpose and direction to their lives", we are left with a system which appears to take very little account of the individual. There is, after all, only a fine line between "developing" and "pushing"!

John Holt's view on this was typically bold and challenging:

Holt's vision was of learning without teaching and was soundly based on his own observations and experience as an increasingly disillusioned teacher. He believed that children:

This is an argument for 'de-schooling' on a grand scale: education should instead be based within real life and could take place both at home and within some sort of, shall we say, 'learning resource centres'.

One such centre which, in modern parlance, we might refer to as a 'family wellness hub and after-school club' was the physical centre of The Peckham Experiment. To quote the website discussing the 'experiment':

It might seem strange for me to include what you might view as simply a 'health centre' in an article about education, but John Holt (writing in the Foreword to 'The Self-Respecting Child' - see above) viewed the Centre as a particulalry shining example of the complete uselessness of professional teaching, as opposed to self-directed learning:

Reading an August 2011 article in the UK Guardian newspaper, by Emily Charkin, we can easily see why John Holt was so inspired by the Centre. It is also extrenely encouraging for any parents who choose self-directed learning at home for their children:

Given those descriptions of the children's learing behaviour, I wonder if the founders might have been influenced by A S Neill, who founded Summerhill only 5 years earlier?

To carry out, as home-educating parents, the type of radical de-schooling which John Holt favoured does require a quite profound belief, even faith, in children's abilities. His books provide information and experience but, without that acquired faith, it is virtually impossible to carry through the idea of completely unstructured home-based learning.

So what can we base that faith on? Children learn to walk, because they want to be able to explore their world; they learn to talk, in order to communicate with the world. Some parents may try to assist in either or both of these processes, but they happen anyway.

It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that if children perceive a compelling reason to learn any other skill or subject, they will work unstintingly, enthusiastically and in an intensely concentrated way on their own self-directed learning.

And these are exactly the type of comments which ex-Sudbury Valley children made when surveyed by John Gray and recounted in 'Free to Learn' (Chapter 5 - 'Lessons from Sudbury Valley'). I imagine, also, that children at the Peckham Centre might well have had similar views, based on their own experience of self-directed learning.

That compelling reason could easily be that a chosen University subject requires certain GCSE's or A levels (the UK school exams for 15 and 18-yr olds respectively). If a self-directed young person wants to get in to that university, he or she will do what it takes to achieve that.

For myself, I was not home-educated at all and did well at school, but something about my parents' attitude to life had clearly helped me to develop a confident 'can do' attitude. So I decided that I could learn Mandarin, because we were planning a trip to China, Arabic for a trip to Egypt and that I would be able to brush up on the Italian I had learnt 30 years earlier.

It never crossed my mind that I would have to attend classes at some type of language school; I simply came across some audio courses and worked at them systematically and doggedly. That is the attitude which our children must have if they are to navigate a rapidly changing world, otherwise a lack of confidence will hold them back in any endeavour. The opposite attitude, which school instils in children, can be countered by us as parents, but this might well turn out to be a hard slog.

The baleful and soul-destroying influence of school education was particularly apparent in a young woman in her 20s who we talked to: she had an A level in French but couldn't speak it and thought it would be too difficult to learn. I assured her that she would have a good vocabulary and just needed to brush up on it, but she remained unconvinced and said that she would have forgotten it all.

So, yes, we should be able to work on the assumption that children will self-confidently decide that they can learn anything they need to. Except that the opposite belief has been instilled in them by schools from before the aqe of five.

Fundamentally, we need to hold in our hearts John Holt's words: the idea that one can only learn by being taught is "100% false".

From my own experience, we never saw the long trips abroad with our children as 'learning experiences', like the little bands of school kids we see in our village, with their clipboards and questionnaires … why can't they just be left to look and think? We would just amble around, sit, talk, look and soak up the wonderful experience of being immersed in a foreign culture. And at the spectacular ruins of the ancient Greek city of Ephesus, in Turkey, we spent the whole day there: our boys spent hours running around and exploring everything, whilst the other children just looked bored. And this was in 2006, before mobile phones and so-called 'social media' had been able to further destroy the confidence and joy which school had always seriously impaired.

And our trips were all low budget trips, so we – very importantly, I think - weren't insulated from real life in the countries we were visiting.

Our approach was unstructured and the vital principle for me was always that they were not coerced into learning things - they learnt things they wanted to, and when they wanted to, which meant that they were interested in a vast variety of things. Adults who came into contact with our boys always commented on how pleasant, well behaved, articulate and easy to be with they were - and I have to assume that a lot of that is because they have (essentially) never been to school.

It's encouraging to see that home learning has gained respect in some enlightened sections of the education establishment: Boston University, in the USA, welcomes applications from non-schooled students, stating that, they "possess the knowledge, independence and self-reliance that enable them to excel in our intellectually challenging programs of study".

But school and education are such sacred cows in our society that other people - even those with a generally 'alternative' viewpoint - were often quite angry that, by choosing to home educate our children, we could even consider depriving our children of school and the opportunity to make friends - as if school is just a big social club. I wish it were just this, without its pretensions of education and its undercurrent of social conditioning.

For me, the fundamental question is whether we want our children to become happy people - deeply happy, in the core of their being - and how best we can achieve that.

After all, what type of world do we want? Do we have the courage and independence to care more for our children's happiness than for their 'success'? Do we want our children to fit well into the existing order, to become standardised people whose needs can be anticipated, people who co-operate smoothly and consume more and more, people who do what is expected of them?

Or do we want them to become happy people, whose values are not to have much, but to be much? People who will automatically lean towards a gentler, more sensitive approach to themselves, other people and the world around them.

I am convinced that an unstructured home education will turn out young people with very similar capabilities to the ex-pupils of the 'free schools' Summerhill and Sudbury Valley (discussed above).

To repeat what I wrote when discussing those schools: such an approach pays huge dividends: it turns out socially-able, confident and motivated young people, who can turn their hand to anything they choose and lead a successful and happy life.

George Bernard Shaw wrote:

As parents, I believe strongly that we also need to make the decision between instilling in our children the - all too prevalent - view that the only thing which really matters in life is full marketplace success or, instead, helping them towards full human development.

Indeed, to use Shaw's words, I am convinced that raising unreasonable men and women will have a much greater benefit to the world than raising people who simply adapt to the world as it is, thus potentially (to paraphrase Maria Montessori) cancelling their own personalities.

30 years ago I wrote:

With my children now in their 30s, I can look back and say that all of that did indeed come to pass. And now the four of us are a team, helping each other out when needed and giving advice to each other when one has come across something which could be helpful

© Andrew Green, November 2016, substantially amended September 2026

Articles > Education outside the norm - a discussion