The most essential principles that school children learn from regimented institutionalized schooling are 1.) that they are incapable of teaching and directing themselves 2.) that their time does not belong to them and 3.) that hatred of the unbearable present is a natural part of human existence.
This conditioning follows most of us into our adult lives, as we exchange one domineering form of authority for yet another and never learn intellectual/mental independence. We enter the workplace to sell our time to bosses and fulfill alienating, drone-like work positions, without ever really figuring out what is important to us or fully understanding the vital concept of self-direction.
The spoon-feed cycle spills over into all aspects of our lives, as we look to media talking head "specialists" and "experts" to tell us what we should know and point us to information they deem important.
Worst of all, we are constantly living for the promise of a utopian future that never arrives. School children are waiting for recess, the 3 o'clock bell and summer, while adults are waiting for lunch, the 5 o'lock hour and vacation. Our lives basically become an abstract mosaic of past and future. The present loses all meaning and becomes irrelevant, yet the idea that present misery is necessary for future happiness/comfort has been driven into our psyche since the day we entered the schooling regiment.
Llewellyn passionately encourages kids to cast off these lies and take their minds and futures into their own hands, rather than buying into the empty abstractions and false promises of a institutionalized education system that kills off innate human spontaneous curiosity and love of learning.
I won't reiterate what other reviewers have stated, but my favorite part about this book is Llewellyn's argument that true learning/intellect is born out of lived experience, not regurgitated facts memorized sans meaningful context and later forgotten. She shatters a slew of myths associated with institutionalized schooling, particularly the idea that the school setting provides a child with "friends." (Any meaningful friendships that occur within the age-segregated, institutionalized school environment truly occur accidentally, despite school authorities' best efforts to prevent "unauthorized" interaction!) Or that conventional schooling is a prerequisite for college and a "good job" later on in life. None of these myths bear a spark of truth, but what they are designed to do is prevent children from harnessing their unique potential as individuals and realizing the world of possibility that exists outside of the four walls of One-Size-Fits-All Junior High. And if they starting thinking along these lines, who knows where such radical thinking might lead?
Give this book to every school kid you know. At the very least, it might provoke a shift of consciousness that just might save their intellectual life during their time in the schooling machine.
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Veronika Sophia Robinson
Home Education ~ the way of the future
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 25, 2010