Why am I passionate about this?

I attended school for fourteen years, experiencing a wide range of different school types, from an experimental child-centred school in Washington DC to a Steiner school in rural Wiltshire to an all-girls’ comprehensive school in Bath. I hated school and my teachers and peers frequently hated me. In revenge, I became a historian of childhood and education in modern Britain so I could try and work out why school was so bad, and why children and teenagers are not listened to in British society. I did my PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and am now an Academic Track Fellow in History at Newcastle University. 


I wrote

A Progressive Education?: How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools

By Laura Tisdall,

Book cover of A Progressive Education?: How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools

What is my book about?

A Progressive Education? argues that ideas about both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh schools after WWII.…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Deschooling

Laura Tisdall Why did I love this book?

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.

By Ian Lister,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Deschooling as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Schooling the Smash Street Kids

Laura Tisdall Why did I love this book?

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’.

Book cover of Schools Out! The Hidden History of Britain's School Student Strikes

Laura Tisdall Why did I love this book?

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.

By Steve Cunningham, Michael Lavalette,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Schools Out! The Hidden History of Britain's School Student Strikes as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Young people, we are told, are totally disengaged from political debate. True, distrust of the Westminster political game has alienated many. But as soon as an opportunity arises to effect real change - whether that's the independence referendum in Scotland or Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour Party leader - young people have engaged, enthusiastically and in numbers.In late 2010 young students left their schools and sixth form colleges to join mass demonstrations against cuts and student fees. In much of the press they were dismissed as truants, easily led and unthinking. But, whenever they were given a chance, young students…


Book cover of Schooling and Social Identity: Learning to Act your Age in Contemporary Britain

Laura Tisdall Why did I love this book?

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”’.

By Patrick Alexander,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Schooling and Social Identity as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book examines the nature of age as an aspect of social identity and its relationship to experiences of formal education. Providing a new and critical approach to debates about age and social identity, the author explores why age remains such an important aspect of self-making in contemporary society. Through an ethnographic account of a secondary school in the south-east of England, the author poses three principal questions. Why are schools in English organised according to age? How do pupils and teachers learn to 'act their age' while at school? Ultimately, why does age remain such an important and complex…


Book cover of A Deadly Education

Laura Tisdall Why did I love this book?

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!

By Naomi Novik,

Why should I read it?

14 authors picked A Deadly Education as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Enter a school of magic unlike any you have ever encountered.

There are no teachers, no holidays, friendships are purely strategic, and the odds of survival are never equal. Once you're inside, there are only two ways out: you graduate or you die.

El Higgins is uniquely prepared for the school's many dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out untold millions - never mind easily destroy the countless monsters that prowl the school.

Except, she might accidentally kill all the other students, too. So El is trying…


Explore my book 😀

A Progressive Education?: How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools

By Laura Tisdall,

Book cover of A Progressive Education?: How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools

What is my book about?

A Progressive Education? argues that ideas about both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh schools after WWII. Covering the period 1918 to 1979, it shows that by putting children at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. Progressive education, basing its claims about child nature on developmental psychology, shaped more restrictive and pessimistic ideas about childhood and youth, despite its claim to offer greater autonomy in the classroom. Young people became defined even more tightly by their chronological age and lost freedoms they had previously possessed. This new conception of age established a way of thinking about children and young people that is still dominant today.

Book cover of Deschooling
Book cover of Schooling the Smash Street Kids
Book cover of Schools Out! The Hidden History of Britain's School Student Strikes

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