The news arrived via one of HEM’s e-mail newsletters. When I read that Growing Without Schooling had ceased publication after nearly 25 years, I immediately began mourning. The news, albeit trivial by comparison, reminded me of September 11th; suddenly and irrevocably, the world was a different place. My fiancée, whose essay appears in the magazine’s final issue, also took the news like the loss of a cherished relative. We spent the following hour discussing what the publication had meant to us. For other grown homeschoolers, such as 25-year-old Sarah Smith, the news brought tears.

When GWS began publication in 1977, homeschooling as a movement was small and still illegal in many states. Support groups did not exist in most areas of the country and one was fortunate if another homeschooler lived in the same region of the state. GWS, founded and edited by unschooler patron-saint John Holt, was a main pipeline to other homeschooling families. While much of the world looked upon homeschooling with disapproval and hostility, GWS was a space where parents and homeschoolers found support and a place to discuss the challenges and joys of homeschooling. GWS was a bastion of the homeschooling movement right up until it ceased publication earlier this month.

What makes the end of GWS such a loss for me and other grown homeschoolers is the sense that we will lose the community we had found within its pages. There were so few homeschoolers when we were coming of age; we looked to the pages of GWS for other young adults who could appreciate our situation. Although I had friends who went to school, I also needed relationships with teens who understood life without school—and the issues that accompanied such a life.

"I think GWS defined most of how I thought of myself as a homeschooler," says Dori Griffin, 21, who now attends the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. "It made me feel so much less alone. There weren’t a lot of homeschoolers around here [in Tennessee]."

This community, found in GWS, was tangible and active despite geographical separation. I edited a magazine for four years and many of my subscribers came from this base. Many of my closest friends, although they live in different states, also came from the pages of GWS. And when it was time to locate subjects for my Grown Without Schooling documentary, I found them through this same informal, homeschooling network. Even my fiancée came from this group; years ago I wrote for an issue of GWS with two of her sisters on the cover.

Dori, whom I’ve known for years but never spoken with before this article, is of the same mind.

"I sense a really strong feeling of community among grown-up homeschoolers who have read GWS a long time," she says. "We all kind of know each other, even though we really don’t." Stories about other homeschoolers inspired Dori, gave her guidance and provided a community of like-minded teens when many of the homeschoolers in her area were more structured in their homeschooling.

The magic of GWS can be explained by the philosophy and structure of the publication. Unlike virtually every other magazine on the market, the readers directly created most of the publication’s content. GWS was a nearly democratic forum where homeschoolers were given voice alongside their parents. Further, the curriculum and ideas discussed were secondary to the lives of the people who wrote the articles. Thus homeschoolers such as Sarabeth Matilsky grew up in the pages of GWS.

"If we were a kids publication—we just printed kids’ writing—then we would have published Sarabeth’s piece at age 10 but not now," says Susannah Sheffer, who edited GWS for most of the years following John Holt’s death in 1985. "Here, the latest issue has a piece by her and she’s a grown woman. The idea that the same publication can accommodate her at different ages is a distinct and interesting phenomenon."

This continuity in the magazine allowed me and the many other homeschooling teens to transcend our geographic boundaries, locating and familiarizing ourselves with what would otherwise be a dispersed and unrealized community.

We augmented our community with interaction outside the magazine. "I would scramble for GWS as soon as it would come to get pen-pals out of the back of the magazine," recalls Sarah Smith of Missouri, whose first thought after hearing about the closing of GWS was concern for the magazine’s fabled pen-pal section. "Oh, no; now young homeschoolers can’t go searching for pen-pals!" Before e-mail and the Internet, a robust web of homeschooling pen-pals, myself included, further developed our informal community. GWS would put homeschoolers on the map by publishing our essays, and link together our pen-pal networks with its homeschooler directory and pen-pal section. I first met Sarabeth when she sent me a letter after reading one of my essays in GWS. She wanted to be my pen-pal.

The informal network with other homeschoolers exists to this day—and I suspect it will always exist. Whether for this column or for my documentary, I am able to call grown homeschoolers I had read about years ago in GWS. They are either familiar with my name or are good friends with one of my friends. With this connection I am never alone. When I travel, I am almost always near a homeschooling friend, or a homeschooling friend of a friend; when I go against the grain in society, I take support from grown homeschoolers who have made similar choices. Such is the importance of GWS in the lives of many grown homeschoolers.

"I wasn’t that directly connected," says 24-year-old Dawn Shuman Borchelt, who lives with her homeschooled husband in Accokeek, Maryland. "But I knew I could be connected. GWS was a large part of my sense of homeschooling community."

While a wonderful magazine, GWS’ emphasis on community and on eschewing homeschooling "experts" always presented a financial challenge. Money "has been a struggle for a very long time," admits GWS publisher Pat Farenga. No one could claim that GWS exploited the homeschooling movement for personal gain. Yet we thought GWS and its community, John Holt’s legacy, would find a way to continue. For those of us who grew up with the magazine and the culture, GWS was an institution that always existed and always would exist. "There was always something that came through for us," says Pat. When they finally ran out of options, he relates, "It was a surprise to us as well."

Upon learning of the news, my mother said it was as if Holt had died again. For me, it was akin to the loss of a parent. "We are adult homeschoolers in a scary world," Sarah aptly summarizes, "and we have no GWS." The illusion of a safety net is gone—the homeschooling world of our youth does not exist any longer. Like the death of a parent, we as grown homeschoolers now keep the memories and spread the wisdom of the past. The GWS of the future rests in our hands, homeschoolers now adults, who have lived the ideas of John Holt.

"It is almost as if we have been entrusted with a secret for this new generation of homeschoolers who don’t know about GWS or haven’t really experienced it," says Sarah, contemplating the ramifications of a world without GWS. "It is important that we carry that with us, those of us who were raised by it and with it. I hope it doesn’t fade; John Holt would be terribly disappointed in us if we let it go."

Dawn is comforted by history. "I think that all real communities like GWS dissolve over time and are reborn," she says. "That’s how community works." The director of religious education at a Unitarian church, community plays a strong role in Dawn’s life. "It might just be a natural ending. Maybe it is time for us, who grew up homeschooling, to start our own magazine? In a way, GWS might have been of limited use to me as a parent homeschooling, because I think my issues are going to be different from the issues of people who are doing it as a first generation thing." Yet GWS could have evolved and was evolving.

"Each of us in our own way is going to carry part of GWS with us forever," eulogizes Sarah. "No one is ever going to forget it."

Growing Without Schooling will be missed.

This article first appeared in the January-February, 2002 issue of Home Education Magazine.