I’ve been doing the New Year clean-up shuffle over the past few days. Among the piles of random notes falling out of my journal and cluttering up my desk was this quote from John Holt: “People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.” When I first came across this quote (although I must have read it before, having devoured all of Holt’s books as they were published), I shrugged it off as stating the obvious – at least if one believes in the parental right to oversee a child’s education. It even seemed a bit odd to me that Holt, of all people, would be forgetting that children should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want. But on second glance, I realized that “themselves” is likely the operative word. I’m guessing that he was referring to the fact that parents should be role models of self-directed learning for their children in a sort of doing unto others manner. Since I can’t locate the context of the sentence, I’ll have to continue to wonder. But I do know that too many of us – yes, even unschoolers – forget that if life learning works for our kids, it works for us too…and that learning doesn’t stop when one turns 16 or 25 or 60.