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Have I ever told you about the time I decided to drop out of school?

I haven’t?

Well, let’s correct that now.

I was sixteen years old and had just finished reading Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook (subtitled “How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education”). Llewellyn suggested an unschooling approach to education and I thought it sounded amazing. That was it. I was dropping out.

I was reminded of my teenage dropout days when I started reading Lucy Frank’s The Homeschool Liberation League, in which Katya gets fed up with school and with the person she is at school and takes a radical step: she turns around and leaves.

In camp that summer, she’d learned how much she COULD learn when she was interested in the topic she was studying–and now the mind-numbing, sleep inducing dreariness of teachers who don’t care and fellow students who only care about popularity has become too much for her. She wants to learn like she did at camp–and she thinks she has the solution.

Homeschooling.

One of the girls at camp did it, and it sounded fantastic.

So Katya’s returned home from the first day of school, determined to drop out and be homeschooled.

Now to convince her parents.

Lucy Frank says that this novel is her “tribute to the range of learning possibilities available to kids today”–and I’ll say it makes a pretty good tribute. It plays with some of the concepts many a homeschooling mom has explored–from unschooling to “school-at-home” to an “eclectic” approach to homeschooling. It shows students alternately having difficulties with and thriving under some of the many options available to kids–from public schools to charter schools to private schools to homeschool co-ops.

I didn’t get the impression that Frank is a sold-out believer in any one system of education (public/private/homeschooling/etc.)–she portrays each setting as having its own challenges and advantages, as I think she ought. Frank also does a good job of showing how different learning environments can be ideal for different students.

That being said, this isn’t a didactic book, all about different methods of learning. Really, it’s just a story–a story about a girl who wants to learn but finds that school just isn’t cutting it for her. It’s a story many of us can probably identify with.

I know I can.

After all, I was sixteen year old homeschooler who read a book about unschooling and decided to drop out of school. :-)

Katya and her parents tried a number of different approaches as they tried to figure out what was right for her–and the ultimate solution turned out to not be what any of them expected.

My dropout days didn’t quite end like I expected, either. I had goals, you see. College, a career. I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to be a dietitian. I could drop out of “school”–but I’d still need to take chemistry at the public school like I was already doing. I’d still need to finish my trigonometry (that I was doing at home.) I still wanted to do our co-op literature class.

Basically, I could “officially” drop out of school–but it wouldn’t really change anything. Because even if I wished I could just have fun learning about this and that whenever the yen struck me, I had goals–and the program my parents and I had already come up with was designed to achieve those goals.

Maybe I’m just an idealist–but I get the idea that a student reading The Homeschool Liberation League might take it almost like I took The Teenage Liberation Handbook. They might realize that maybe school should be interesting–that maybe even they could enjoy learning. They might start to explore and to discuss with their parents the many options that are available to them as students.

And I think that’s probably a good thing.

Rating: 4 stars
Category: Young Adult Fiction
Synopsis: Katya leaves school to be homeschooled–if she can convince her parents to let her be homeschooled, that is.
Recommendation: A fun read, an interesting exploration of the many schooling options available to students nowadays. Both young adults and older adults will likely enjoy this title.

Visit my books page for more reviews and notes.

My dad claims to have only finished one book in his lifetime–a Hardy Boys mystery he finished in high school.

It’s not that my dad isn’t smart. He’s just not a reader. He says he never opened his textbooks–he just attended lectures and explained things to his roommates. He’s not sure reading would have done him any good.

He loves information, loves learning, but he reads slowly, laboriously. It requires a huge amount of work from him.

So he finds other ways of getting information. He listens to lectures, podcasts, and sermons. He reads short chunks online. He listens to talk radio discussions of books. He watches the history channel or documentaries.

And occasionally, he has his children read for him.

I have always been a voracious reader. I started reading in kindergarten, and by first grade, I was sneaking out of bed to read late into the night with the light that streamed from the cracked open bedroom door.

In sixth grade, I read Plato’s Republic and had my dad borrow copies of Jonathon Edwards’ sermons from the University Library.

Shortly thereafter, I became my dad’s designated reader.

He’d buy a book, bring it home, present it to me, and inform me that he wanted an executive summary. (This, of course, was after he’d spent dinner times of my entire elementary years attempting to teach me the concept of “summary”–particularly that a summary was shorter than the original work.)

And so I’d read a book and then give Dad the summary. We’d talk about what I’d read, the ideas found within. I’d read a few quotes aloud and he’d ask questions when my summary wasn’t clear.

It was a fantastic teaching strategy–and a way for Dad to read without reading.

The only problem was that since Dad didn’t actually see the book he was “reading”, he sometimes forgot that he’d “read” it. One day, in my later teen years, he brought me home a book, Spurgeon on Prayer and Spiritual Warfare. I congratulated him on his purchase and told him that he now had a copy for himself. I had my own copy–it was one of the first books I’d summarized for him.

After I went away to college, I had other things to do and the habit of reading and discussing my reading with my dad fell by the wayside.

Until one day, I got a yen for the executive summary. I’m not sure how much my summaries enriched my dad’s mind–but I know that it had an indelible impact on me. I learn so much more when I engage the material, when I talk or write about it, when I discuss it with someone else.

So I started writing executive summaries. This time they’re on my blog. And instead of my dad, you are now my unwitting partners in learning.

Maybe Dad learned from my summaries, maybe he didn’t.

Maybe you enjoy my summaries, maybe you don’t.

But I’m gonna keep writing them, because they keep my mind alive.

(Some examples of books I’ve written executive summaries of in the past year include The Cross of Christ, Forgotten God, Unveiling Islam, and Why We Love the Church)

Book Review: “The Homeschool Liberation League”

Executive Summary