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How Children Fail by John Holt
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Instead of Education by John Holt
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The Lives of Children by George Dennison
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The Way It Spozed to Be by James Herndon
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Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of
Scholars by Paul Goodman
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| The Case Against College by Caroline Bird
(strays into feminism)
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The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit
School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn
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| and more recently,
A Life in School: What the
Teacher Learned by Jane Tompkins (strays into feminism, which I find
very boring, so I never actually finished)
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Not the typical freshman pastime, I suppose, but it
suited me. John Holt was probably my favorite, and in fact my mom said that in
home schooling us (I've 3 siblings) she'd been influenced by him. Here are
some articles relating to Holt: General
Info Article, Interview.
I came to college with the naïve expectation of finding
mentorship, scholarship and intellectual camaraderie beyond anything I'd known.
Needless to say, I didn't find it. After that year I basically decided to "take a
semester off"/quit forever; but after working at Wal-Mart for awhile and
becoming deeply interested in physics I decided that a degree, though loathsome
in concept, might be useful in reality. So I came back. I'm not quite sure how
many degrees I'll stay for, physics is one of those things where you can end up
living in school (shudder), and a Ph. D. can be useful in reality. Still, I've
always thought it would be...well, just plain FUNNY I guess, if somebody won the
Nobel Prize without a degree, or at least with only a bachelor's. We'll
see...I've got a bit of a history with being lucky. Not that I think it would be
easy, or even that I'd really want to do it, but I definitely don't think
it's impossible and it would make a point.