Patrick Farenga brings more than 36 years of fieldwork, advocacy, and personal experience to help parents and children learn in their own ways. Farenga is a writer and education activist who addresses academic and general audiences about working with children, not on children, to help them learn.
Farenga continues the work of John Holt, one of the founders of the modern homeschooling movement who started Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) in 1977. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about learning without going to school. After Holt’s death in 1985, Farenga published GWS until 2001.
Farenga speaks as a homeschooling expert at education conferences around the world as well as on commercial radio and television talk shows in the United States (The Today Show, Good Morning America) and abroad. Farenga writes about homeschooling and self-directed learning for a number of publications and operates the John Holt/Growing Without Schooling website, www.johnholtgws.com. He is also a founding member of Alliance for Self-Directed Education.
Farenga’s books include The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling (Holt, 1998), Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus, 2003), The Legacy of John Holt: A Man Who Genuinely Understood, Trusted, and Respected Children (HoltGWS, 2013), and How to Report Unschooling to School Officials (HoltGWS, 2015).
Farenga has also written chapters about homeschooling in Encyclopedia Britannica (2014, 2010), A Parent's Guide to Homeschooling (Mars Publishing, 2002), Creating Learning Communities (FER, 2000), The Handbook of Alternative Education (Macmillan, 1994), The Exhausted School (Oxford Village, 1992), Schooling At Home (John Muir, 1990), and The Encyclopedia of School Administration (Sage, 1988).
Sessions
Tired of School at Home? Try Unschooling