100 books like Schooling the Smash Street Kids

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.

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.

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”’.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ross Greene’s work for a long time because he is changing the way parents and educators look at children with behavioral challenges. His powerful motto, “Kids do well when they can” is a call for teaching lagging executive skills, instead of punishing kids for having executive functioning challenges. Instead of thinking of a child with ADHD as being a “behavior problem” or “unmotivated”, Dr. Greene's Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) approach helps parents and educators focus on the true factors contributing to challenging behaviors, empowering educators to address these factors and create helping relationships with their most at-risk kids.

The stories are twisted and disturbing, and the artwork is just as awesome. This is the sort of book to give a kid (or even an adult) who says they don’t like reading. The books they beat you over the head with at school are boring enough to turn anyone into a non-reader; this little gem may just be the antidote to this situation.

One of Dr. Greene’s basic beliefs, reiterated often in this wise and compassionate book, is that “Kids do well if they can.” Instead of seeing their child as manipulative, attention-seeking, stubborn, controlling, or defiant, readers learn to understand that really, the child lacks some necessary skills: flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, emotion regulation, and problem-solving. Using a combination of exposition, explanation, and stories from his decades of practice with troubled kids in many circumstances, Greene shows parents how to put the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model into action. He reassures readers that—even if they’ve been doing it all wrong until now—there’s always room for growth and change, starting now. “Kids are resilient,” he writes. “They come around if we start doing the right thing.”

The Austins live in rural New England, where the four children take joy in nature, do chores cheerfully, and have a club committed to nonconformity. The family’s faith and interests in the arts and sciences are weaved seamlessly into their daily life. And although death is discussed throughout, themes of light and love permeate. 

This isn’t the most well-known of L’Engle’s books, but it’s a feel-good portrait of domestic life. If I had read it when I was young, I’m sure I would have wanted to be an Austin kid. Reading it as a mother, I want to crack the parents’ code.

When I picked up this book at a local bookstore in Indiana, I knew that it was going to take me places – the cover photo of two adorable children, one white and one black, standing in front of a yellow school bus told me that.

Julia Scheeres’s parents adopted an African American child her age named David, and the two became inseparable. Their extraordinary story – their intense commitment to each other as they move through dystopian settings ranging from the bleakness of rural Indiana to a strict religious reform school in the tropical Caribbean – was inspiring.

And the jaw-dropping ending of the book just broke me into pieces. 

I used my wages as an 18-year-old factory hand to establish the small press that published The God Squad. Forty-six years later, I’m still involved in publishing. In all that time, Suffer the Little Children (subtitled “The Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools”) is the most important book I played any part in publishing.

It is the definitive history of all religious-run institutions. The forensic use of official documents and the diligent investigative work by the authors left no room for dispute about the cruel systems of control which religious orders exercised over women and children trapped in their care with the acquiescence of the state. It shows the world that my character, Sean Blake, is saved from by being adopted by loving parents and told nothing about his identity.