100 books like Deschooling

Naomi Novak could write anything, and I would read it, but I am a sucker for dark academia.

Well, this one takes the cake with a school that is actively trying to kill the students. While this book is pretty dark in parts, it was the instances of light that really kept me reading the entire series.

There were many times I wasn’t sure where it would lead, but I was never disappointed by what I discovered.

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”’.

If interested in reflecting on the point of “education,” this book is a must-read. Giving to the reader a philosophical take on “schooling,” Illich forces you to think about just what “school” is about. Is “school” about achieving grades or character? Is “school” about self-discovery, or is “school” about leading minds into becoming the perfect “citizen”? Illich challenges the current educational paradigm to awaken minds to realize that there is more to “school” than burdening children with a curriculum that fails to relate to them.

This little book from 1973 made me realize I wrongly believed that all technological advancement was progress. Why should it be? With every invention that promises to make life easier, ask this question, says Illich: "Will this make me a more independent, capable human being? Or will human qualities be made obsolete?"

In the Middle Ages, people built cathedrals without burning fuel. We have since lost this ability. Is that progress? Ivan Illich introduces the concept of radical monopolies: industrial processes that make non-industrial activities impossible. "Cars can [...] monopolize traffic [...] practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles." Likewise, funeral systems rule out the possibility of burying a loved one ourselves.

Illich is a radical philosopher of thin books, best read slowly.

Everything is relative…and this book makes me feel like a normal person. Ivan Illich is one of the 20th century’s great thinkers (google him), and he has inspired many of the current critical studies fields that are gaining headway in the academy.

He was a man of principles. In this book, he lays out his principled reasons for why our current medical industrial complex in the West is making us unhealthy and unhappy. And what an alternative would look like. You did google him, right? So, you know what that alternative made him look like in the end…

LeMasters hung out at a tavern in Wisconsin from 1967 to 1972, talking to factory workers who held well-paying, unionized jobs in the heyday of American industrial production. Working-class lives are so different now that I wish I could enter a time machine and travel back to the 1960s and talk to working-class men then. LeMasters’s book is as close as one can get to doing that. He describes the outlook of the tavern regulars on their work, their families, and the world around them. Despite their prosperity, they express attitudes about public life that, in some respects, would not sound out of place in a focus group of working-class adults today.   

Keith Waterhouse is a forgotten writer nowadays, which is a shame. His dreamy character, Billy Liar, is a brilliant creation and one for all ages–the original young man stifled by family, boredom, and expectations who wants to break free from it all and live out the life he’s already living for himself in his head.

I read this book when I was a teenager, probably because my Dad often called me and my brother ‘Billy Liar,’ such as when I told him I wanted to be a jockey. I was too heavy for that profession, even then (plus, I’d never sat on a horse and still haven’t). Still, that’s the joy and absurdity of this book; it takes the notion of following your dreams to a new and dangerous level.

Personally, I’m always fascinated with dreamers like Billy. But there are times when his life choices make you groan.

A highly opinionated, and thus sometimes frustrating, analysis of the pre-Civil War minstrel show, and how it impacted both oppressed African-Americans and the working-class whites who made the shows so popular. This was the first major book to advance the idea that the minstrel show was not only an exploitation of black culture (the “theft”), but also appreciated that culture and began its integration into the American musical mainstream (the “love”), which would prove to have profound implications in decades to come. An influential book that has been frequently cited in subsequent works.