Do you ever feel discontented by school? Grace Llewellyn can give you that extra boost you need to just quit.

Grace started her teaching career as a substitute teacher in Southern California. In her book, she writes, "In between sending students to the office for calling me a ‘white bitch’ or for pinching me or for loudly interrupting too many times, I’d sit and despairingly ponder the meaninglessness of theses huge inner-city schools." School had destroyed the students natural desire to learn.

She later got a job at an experimental school, The Colorado Springs School and truly thought she could change the way students felt about learning. She soon discovered that to be false. While on a trip to Washington D.C. with the school, she lost all hope. The students had been "scolded for slouching and whispering during a dull evening lecture after a particularly exhausting day," and it got her thinking. If a person freely chooses to take part in something, they will naturally behave and learn. Most kids have no choice about going to school, or so they believe.

The book is broken up into five sections. The first will help you in your decision to become self-educated. The second helps you with the first steps to take after making that decision, from creating your own "assignments" to the possible legal process involved in becoming an "official" homeschooler. Part three explains how to cover specific curricula. It doesn’t advocate mandatory history lessons, but if your interested in a certain subject, it’s a great starting point. Part four helps you in your quest for work, be it volunteering, internships and apprenticeships, farmwork, medical research, marine biology, etc. Part five contains the stories of many homeschoolers. It’s great encouragement for those prospective homeschoolers to hear stories of others who have made the choice to control their own education.

Overall, the book is great, especially if you already think school is terrible. It will reinforce that belief not with stories from discontented students, but with a teacher’s perspective, someone who lived it, someone who regretably taught it, someone who now wants to make a change and ensure that people won’t be unwillingly subjected to the mundane, often devoid of learning public school system.

oblivion@oblivion.net