How Did You Homeschool Without the Internet? When you click on the item and go to its description you may discover that the book or product has been updated for the 21st century, or that it is perfectly useful in its original edition, which I think is more often the case than not.

However, just seeing the titles and reading their blurbs can give you ideas of more recent, similar things you and your children would enjoy reading or using.

For instance, there is but one computer program in the whole catalog, but this isn’t surprising since the catalog ended in 2001, just as educational software via Internet began to establish itself. This reading list contains the majority of materials we sold during our 31 years of business (I’ll add more as I discover what I missed), and some of them are undoubtedly dated. John Holt saw this need and addressed it by creating John Holt’s Book and Music Store, a mail-order catalog, built around books and materials parents could use with their children, as well as many items that can be used by children on their own. In 1981 it was nearly impossible to purchase school materials or textbooks for homeschooling use, so we had to rely on conventional bookstores and used bookstores (there were many of both then), third-party sources, public libraries, college libraries, textbook depositories, mail-order catalogs, and word of mouth to locate them. but I soon appreciated their appeal to people who sought ways to live well in an increasingly standardized, technological world that treats education as a mass-produced product that requires force-feeding in school. When I first browsed through the John Holt Book and Music Store catalog I was shocked by titles like How to Raise a Healthy Child In Spite of Your Doctor, How to Play Piano Despite Years of Lessons, Teach Your Own, Anything School Can Do You Can Do Better, Equal Rights for Children, Escape From Childhood, Caring For Your Own Dead, Giving Up the Gun, Deschooling Society.

Holt provided resources, research, support, and personal stories to give ordinary people the courage, ways, and means to teach their own children. When I began work at Growing Without Schooling magazine in 1981 it was clear from the materials John Holt sold that he intended GWS to be a practical resource for parents and learners, as well as provide the intellectual, legal, and social groundwork for a new option to conventional education.

How Children Learn by John C. Holt