In the 1960s and early 70s an influential group of education writers wrote accessibly, for the everyday reader, about the colonizing and radically unequalizing effects of institutionalized education on students and adults. To these critics schools were not benign, apple-on-the-desk acculturating institutions where children could innocently be sent each day to learn the skills they needed to succeed in a meritocratic society. Instead they were organizations designed to colonize, imprint, and shape from within the most vulnerable and least powerful individuals in our culture. This book examines...

In this book, the author brings to light the devastating consequences of an educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens students' interests and dampens down differences among learners. She contends that current structures do not produce the kinds of minds and thinking that society really needs.

The Legacy of John Holt contains sixteen portraits of a radical teacher and writer whose ten books and work influenced schoolteachers and homeschoolers to help children learn in their own ways. Written by friends, colleagues, and homeschoolers who knew Holt personally, this book sheds new light on a pivotal figure in American education whose work continues to inspire the homeschooling movement (which Holt called "unschooling"). People who knew Holt from his college days until his death share stories and details about him that bring his quiet but forceful personality to life for readers and...