John Caldwell Holt was born on April 14, 1923, part of the “GI Generation” and interestingly the same year as my mom and my partner Sally’s parents, plus the same place (New York City) as her parents. There is just the briefest reference to his young life in his Wikipedia biography, but somehow he developed a profound humanist critique of the rules of engagement between adults and youth in our society, one challenging our whole conception of human development and education, including how they are reflected in the social institution we call “school”. The further evolution of his thinking led him to become perhaps the progressive “patron saint” of homeschooling and the inventor (or at least the framer) of the concept of “unschooling”.

On a more personal level, you could call Holt our son Eric’s “savior”. Holt’s truly radical ideas about human development had a profound impact on my partner Sally and me. Those ideas gave us the major justification in 1999 for pulling our son Eric out of school in eighth grade, possibly saving him from a train wreck of an educational experience in his teen years from which he might never have recovered.

In doing the research for this piece and rereading some of Holt’s work, I am struck by how much I have become his kindred spirit. Struck by how much the ideas he champions (so outside the mainstream of conventional wisdom about human development) have inspired me to write and blog about my own take on the truths of how human beings develop and human society evolves.

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I am a huge advocate for unschooling, as I’m sure you can gather if you have read very many of my pieces. Wikipedia defines “unschooling” as a term coined in the 1970s by radical educator John Holt, representing…

A range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. There are some who find it controversial. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities, often initiated by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.

It was a continuing mid-life crisis some five years ago that inspired me to take a long and thoughtful look at (including muster the discipline to write about) my life’s experiences in my first five decades. How could I best leverage all that hair-graying and wrinkle-producing experience as some sort of wisdom as I looked forward to my purpose in the decades (hopefully) ahead?

A main theme emerging from that retro gaze and ponder was identifying the real mechanisms of human development, first looking at my own from young child to young adult and later the same for our two (now young adult) kids. What I saw from my own young life (and echoed by my witness of my kids) was that most of my significant developmental experiences were by Holt’s definition “unschooling”, because they happened outside of school.

In school I mainly learned about things, some of those things were interesting to me, but much of it lacked any context in my life and was not (and as Holt pithily notes is forgotten by the good students only after rather than before the test). There are some notable exceptions of course, including learning how to do many sorts of abstract math problems and proofs. But again lacking any real life context for applying these skills they were soon forgotten as well.

But outside of school my life was all about doing things, which required me to be constantly learning about and how to do new things that did have a context in my real life. In my recent piece “Unschooling in the Art of War” I documented a major narrative thread of “play” from age 7 to 23 starting with toy soldiers on the basement floor through complex historical military simulations, plus all the learning (about and how to) that facilitated that passion.

Not as extensive in duration but more so in concerted effort was another unschooling narrative thread around my “deep dive” from age 14 to 21 into theater (“the play” this time as it were). This thread featured the acquisition of a range of skills and wisdom around communication, collaboration and creativity (elusive goals in formal schooling) plus logistics and management. These are all key capabilities that I still routinely apply today in my “day job” and the rest of my life. All of this was learned because it was useful in a real life enterprise (I had freely chosen to engage in) of mounting theatrical productions.

What follows is my extensive unschooling narrative (like the prior “Art of War” one and about 7K words) that makes up the rest of this piece. Events actually started in school, inspired by one of those charismatic teachers that we are lucky if we have the opportunity to encounter.

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Apple has certainly come a long way as the corporate insurgent (capturing the imagination of my kids and many of their peers) challenging and now outperforming “the man” Microsoft of the computer industry. Of course, Apple has sought brand loyalty from the younger generation for years by marketing their computers to schools, to put them in front of all those young consumers cloistered in those educational venues. The late Steve Job’s company has also advanced their brand by playing the insurgent in the music business, challenging the traditional marketing practices of a moribund music industry with their iPod, iTunes, and now music industry topping iStore.

But now I read that Apple is moving big-time into the textbook business, and I would hope that they would similarly challenge that entrenched corporate establishment as well. Certainly one can argue that big publishing companies like McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, have encouraged what I would consider a damaging centralization, standardization and increasingly OSFA (one size fits all) approach to public education in order to expand and protect their markets for selling textbooks.

But in the intro to Jason Tomassini’s piece “Apple Unveils E-Textbook Strategy for K-12” for Education Week, he calls out that Apple is now allying with rather than challenging the corporate educational “man”…

Apple Inc. announced aggressive new efforts last week to move into the K-12 electronic-textbook market, though educational publishers said the biggest news from the move is how the normally disruptive company is likely to help the publishing industry rather than challenge it. Through a partnership with three major K-12 textbook publishers—McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—Apple is offering interactive textbooks through its iBooks store at $14.99 or less.

These new corporate partners are the who’s who of the “educational-industrial complex”. Of course Apple has been a part of the education market for decades…

In its entirety, the announcement signals Apple’s intent to further deepen its market share in K-12 education. Sales of the iPad are outpacing Mac computers in the education sector, and Apple officials said there were 1.5 million iPads in use in education, more than 1,000 one-to-one iPad computing initiatives in K-12, and 20,000 education apps in the iTunes store.

Certainly public school systems have the potential to save money buying lots of virtual rather than hard-copy textbooks. But the bigger underlying narrative involves these big corporate dinosaurs looking to maintain their control over public education and their many billion dollar market for textbooks and testing materials.

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