The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry... It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." Albert Einstein


Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook is among the very best books for potential homeschoolers (or unschoolers), along with John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down.

Maybe you believe you aren't ready for freedom?

On some level, no one ever is; it's not a matter of age. People of all ages make mistakes with their freedom -- becoming involved with destructive friends, choosing college majors they're not deeply interested in, buying houses with rotten foundations, clearcutting forests, breaking good marriages for dumb reasons... Sure, teenagers make mistakes. So do adults, and it seems to me adults have a harder time admitting and fixing theirs... The only alternative to making mistakes is for someone to make all your decisions for you, in which case you will make their mistakes instead of your own. Obviously, that's not a life of integrity. Might as well start living, rather than merely obeying, before the age of eighteen...

Schools play a nasty trick on all of us. They make "learning" so unpleasant and frightening that they scare many people away from countless pleasures: evenings browsing in libraries, taking an edible plants walk at the nature center, maybe even working trigonometry problems for the hard beauty and challenge of it... By calling school "learning," schools make learning sound like an excruciatingly boring way to waste a nice afternoon. That's low.


It is written for the teen more than for the parent, but parents would do well to read it, too:

Homeschooling parents of teenagers are rarely teachers, in the school sense of the word, and this book never suggests that you forsake your own career or interests in order to learn calculus (etc.) fast enough to "teach" it. Healthy kids can teach themselves what they need to know, through books, various people, thinking, and other means (A freshly unschooled person may at first be a lousy learner; like cigarettes, school-style passivity may be a slow habit to kick)...

If you have helped with or supervised your children's homework, or stayed in close touch with their teachers, homeschooling need not drain your energy any more than that.

Nineteenth-century "educational" methods do not work very well. We do better when we are free to learn what we want, when we want. The Teenage Liberation Handbook rocks.