Have I ever told you about the time I decided to drop out of school?<\/p>\n
I haven’t?<\/p>\n
Well, let’s correct that now.<\/p>\n
I was sixteen years old and had just finished reading Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n
I was reminded of my teenage dropout days when I started reading Lucy Frank’s The Homeschool Liberation League<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Homeschooling. <\/p>\n
One of the girls at camp did it, and it sounded fantastic.<\/p>\n
So Katya’s returned home from the first day of school, determined to drop out and be homeschooled.<\/p>\n
Now to convince her parents.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I know I can.<\/p>\n
After all, I was sixteen year old homeschooler who read a book about unschooling and decided to drop out of school. :-)<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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<\/i> to do our co-op literature class. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m just an idealist–but I get the idea that a student reading The Homeschool Liberation League<\/i> might take it almost like I took The Teenage Liberation Handbook<\/i>. They might realize that maybe school should be interesting–that maybe even they<\/i> could enjoy learning. They might start to explore and to discuss with their parents the many options that are available to them as students.<\/p>\n
And I think that’s probably a good thing.<\/p>\n
Rating:<\/b> 4 stars
\nCategory:<\/b> Young Adult Fiction
\nSynopsis:<\/b> Katya leaves school to be homeschooled–if she can convince her parents to let her be homeschooled, that is.
\nRecommendation:<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n
\n
Visit my books page<\/a> for more reviews and notes.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Read more Book Review: “The Homeschool Liberation League”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[36],"tags":[557,722,1105,1137,1188],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5015"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}