deschoolers

A blurb about Olsen's book on the deschoolers of the 1960s collects what some of us actually read and got motivated about back in the day.  These educational activists have contributed to the real education reform movement, on the ground, citizen-led, grassroots, known as homeschooling.

I first read A.S. Neill 's Summerhill when my neighbor attended the Free School and I wanted to go.  My parents were against it.  I read John Holt, before he wrote Teach Your Own, in 1971.  I also read Goodman  and I wound up applying and being accepted into an alternative high school run within the public school program. The alternative high school, Freedom High, had classes that met in the basement of a church and in an old house where we cooked lunch together every Thursday. I took the bus.  My sister would join a different alternative high school, again within the public school system, modelled after the Parkway Project in Philadelphia.