"At the urging of his sister, Holt became a fifth grade teacher. After several years of teaching in Colorado, he moved to Boston. It was here that he met Bill Hull, a fellow teacher, and they decided to start a classroom observation project; one would teach, while the other would watch. The notes and journal entries Holt accumulated during his first eleven years of teaching formed the core of two of his most popular books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, as well as his less-known and more radical work, Escape from Childhood: The Rights and Needs of Children. These three books detailed the foundational ideas of Holt's philosophy of education."

This info on John Holt highlights to me that actually as unpopular as his ideas were to many in main stream education it can not be denied that Critical reflection was totally at the centre of his practice. This is an important part of my assignment but I am struggling to know how it fits in. I am strongly influenced by John Holts philosophies of education and have even home educated my own children in the past but I also realise that school and schooling does provide a very necessary service for society as a whole. I appreciate his idea that learning occurs through the activity of the learner and not necessarily the teaching but it is difficult in practice when you are a "specialist" in a subject to not make judgments on what activities to encourage or provide. How does this all fit together?