The John Holt Book on Independent Learning. The famous, early deceased educator John Holt, author of several widely read books in Germany ("Smart Kids Become Students," "How Children Learn," "How Children Fail," among others), and his student Pat Farenga, both pioneering figures of the US unschooling movement, provide a well-founded account with countless moving case studies on how and why independent family learning works. The book offers an excellent overview of the many variations of home learning without school—or in loose collaboration with it. It is also made very clear that the official and societal resistance to free learning without school was similar in many states of the USA fifteen to twenty years ago as it is today in Germany. This is encouraging, as free learning in all its forms has now taken root in Germany.