The best books to make you question why schools exist

In the 1960s, radical educational thinkers in the Global North started to question why schools needed to exist at all.

Writers like John Holt, Ivan Illich, and Paul Goodman argued that we should separate ‘education’ from ‘schooling’. Although their views were different, they agreed on a basic set of ideas: children don’t learn much in school; schools are oppressive places, especially for working-class students; and often, they just exist to socialise children for the labour market.

As Holt wrote, "Children are subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail." Lister’s Deschooling Society collects excerpts from these thinkers alongside Lister’s own views. It’s a brilliant introduction to ideas that are still disconcerting today.

Plenty of sociologists have gone into schools and tried to work out what kids think, but few have written about the experience as clearly, directly, and thoughtfully as Corrigan.

Corrigan did research with teenage working-class boys who attended two different schools in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He found, in short, that these boys did not like school; they especially did not like the fact that they were forced to go. This made Corrigan question why we make young people attend institutions that they hate, and which they do not benefit from.

Despite recent ‘progressive’ reforms in education, nothing had changed: ‘they didn’t like [school] when it was all maths and exams; they now didn’t seem to like it when it was all civics and projects’.

As Cunningham and Lavalette argue, there have been school strikes in Britain for as long as there have been schools.

This fascinating popular history is the only book I know of that tells the story of these strikes from the ‘children’s rebellion’ that kicked off in Scotland in the 1880s to the mass walkouts in 2003 to protest against war in Iraq. (I, too, marched against this war as a sixteen-year-old.)

It shows that the same arguments have always been used against student strikers: they are just ‘bunking off’, copying adults, or controlled by more powerful forces. But young people have led their own movements over and over again, recognising that schools are their workplaces, and refusing to go to them is an effective way to protest.

Alexander, an anthropologist, spent a year in a comprehensive school in south-east England between 2007 and 2008 (only a couple of years after I left school myself).

He found that a key job of schools in modern British society is to teach students to ‘act their age’. To be a successful student, young people had to fit into the right set of age-norms. They were expected to become more ‘adult’ as they moved up the school, but adopting ‘adult’ behaviours too early could get them into trouble.

Alexander’s book is full of wonderful reflections on ‘growing up’ from young people themselves. Dominic, a sixth-form student, told him: ‘it seems so contrived in some people, you know, they’re like “well I’m an adult, I’ll act like this!... yeah well I’m 18 so I better… you know”’.

This fantasy novel is set in the Scholomance, a magical school where teenage students are very likely to die as they try to complete their education.

But even though it’s fantasy, it has a lot to say about how hierarchies in schools hurt everybody – whether you’re the ‘gifted’ student who has to hide their powers for fear of vicious bullying, the working-class student whom everyone looks down on, or the ‘stupid’ student who is also socially ostracised.

El, our sarcastic Welsh-Indian narrator, hates her peers, but she hates herself even more, as she tries to grapple with the inherent unfairness of this system. What’s the answer to the Scholomance? Send it off into the void!