Freedom and Beyond

"Can schools do all the things we ask them to do? Are they the best means of doing it? What might be other or better ways?" asks John Holt while looking at the role schooling in society plays in education. The solutions proposed by Holt in Freedom and Beyond mark a significant turning point in Holt's work and is the foundation of all his subsequent writing and his support for homeschooling. This book offers a historical understanding of the free school movement of the 1960s and 1970s while still speaking directly to today's school reform debate. This book examines why the school system wasn't able to change over fifty years ago, and Holt's ideas and analysis seem even more important today, when words like "discipline," "authority," and "choice" are bandied about without the deep investigation of them that Holt provides us with.