11061 Additional Educational Resources

Today for Show and Tell, I've brought a tiny marvel of nature: a single snowflake. I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water, just like every other one, when you bring it in the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I'll... be leaving you drips and going outside. — Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes

The Harvard Classics, a/k/a Dr. Elliot's Five Foot Shelf: 52 books considered, in 1909, to be fundamental to becoming a learned person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

Farr, Michael. 300 Best Jobs Without a Four Year Degree. Jist Publishing, 2009. ISBN 1593576587. Bill Gates and Thomas Edison did not have a college degree, that didn’t stop them from doing what they wanted and needed to do.

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. ISBN 0826412769. 30th Anniversary Edition, Continuum Press, 2000. How modern education becomes a tool of oppression and describes a path to liberation.

Gatto, John Taylor. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteachers Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. ISBN 0865716692. New Society Publishers, 2010. This book focuses on mechanisms of traditional education that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning.

Holt, John. How Children Fail. ISBN 0201484021. Da Capo Press, 1995. How Children Fail began an education reform movement that continues today. In his 1982 edition, John Holt added new insights into how children investigate the world, into the perennial problems of classroom learning, grading, testing, and into the role of the trust and authority in every learning situation. His understanding of children, the clarity of his thought, and his deep affection for children have made both How Children Fail and its companion volume, How Children Learn, enduring classics.

Holy, John. How Children Learn. ISBN 0201484048. Da Capo Press, 1995. John Holt was the first to make clear that, for small children, “learning is as natural as breathing.” In this book, he looks at how we learn to talk, to read, to count, and to reason, and how we can nurture and encourage these natural abilities in our children.

Holt, John. Instead of Education: Ways to Help People to Do Things Better. Sentient Publications, 2003. ISBN 1591810094. Holt's most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a clarion call to parents to save their children from schools of all kinds.

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. ISBN 0714508799. Marion Boyars Publishers, 2000. Schools are the reproductive organs of the modern consumer society. They promote inequality and inhibit social mobility and provide a ready and universal explanation for educational failure that inhibits a rational inquiry into what is going on with the schools. The present system convinces most people that their inferior status is directly related to failures to consume sufficient quantities of educational services.

Koetzsch, Ronald. The Parent’s Guide to Alternatives in Education. Shambhala, 1997. ISBN 1570620679. This book is meant to be a consumer's guide to 22 forms of alternative education available to children whose parents choose not to send them to public schools. It offers an historical perspective of American education, along with the history behind each of the specific alternatives.

Llewellyn, Grace. Guerilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School. Wiley, 2001. ISBN 0471349607. Practical tools to help your children learn.

Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education

Unger, Harlow Giles. But What If I Don’t Want to Go to College? A Guide to Success Through Alternative Education. Ferguson Publishing Company, 2006. ISBN 0816065578. Descriptions, advantages, and disadvantages of 12 types of non-college vocational training programs.