clew's reviews: a book log

The Teenage Liberation Handbook, Grace Llewellyn

This is not a fair review because life is too short to finish this book. I expected to agree with the argument when I started, but it nearly makes me want to change my own opinion to avoid Llewellyn's company.

The argument purports to be that schooling is so bad for most people that teenagers who hate it should plan their own education outside high-school. Good so far. The support slides into deeply unappetizing territory with the opening parable, when she invents horrible "schoolpeople" who love to be zombies. This strawman caricature suggests weak argument, but worse, it undercuts one of the putative beliefs of the book, which is that we all have different tastes and know what's good for us.

The other thing that should have tipped me off to contradictions deep in this particular branch of the movement is their enormous fondness for citing the number of homeschooled kids who go on to Harvard. This is not the cry of the free spirit. This is the cry of the gentry frustrated by having to spend time and taxes with everyone else. I had a lengthy consideration of exactly when it's fair to call people taking their wealth in time instead of cash income 'gentry'—anecdotally, look you, I am one of those people, and it's delightful even if it means darning your socks. But I don't even have to make that argument. From School Figures, pp. 267-268:

What leaps out of this at me is that the homeschooling families earn more money for (usually) half the labor. It would be surprising if children of successful parents, often taught by certified teachers in a kid/teacher ratio better than 4/1, didn't do spectacularly well. Behold the gentry reproducing itself; not prima facie immoral, but not something the rest of the country ought to be impressed by.

Some of that data may not be as economically telling as it looks; for instance, being a certified teacher doesn't always mean having the human capital of a college education to spend on your own family. The difference in watching TV could be a relevant difference in mores or interests, not just the lack of affordable daycare or safe playgrounds.

To finish up with my annoyance at Llewellyn; her argument is based on a belief in, indeed veneration of, the untrammeled instincts of adolescence that's somewhere between Rousseau and a John Hughes film, so of course she wants adolescents to be extra-untrammeled. But the current freedom from 'real work' is largely a product of Depression-era compromise; it wouldn't make any sense to someone in a system more explicitly tied to trades and professions. It makes even less sense against translatio studii or any of the sciences or arts of which Ars longa, vita brevis. Again, to be fair, I know she has sections on starting your real life's work instead of hanging around in school; but (objection 1) that's not the core of her argument and (objection 2) nor is it even what schools are really bad at supporting, given that you know what you want to do and have a mentor, which she has to assume for the unschooled.

I was miserable enough in high school that I don't want to defend the current system, but I don't think Llewellyn's approach fixes much. The lucky run away and commend themselves, everyone else welters. There has to be a better approach.

Other reading, e.g. The Future of School Choice, suggest varied possibilities. Smaller schools are usually better, for one thing, public or not. The early data from the Milwaukee voucher system looked pretty inclusive, e.g. racial composition and school lunch eligibility in the voucher schools was about the same as that in the schools their students left. Scores in the public schools also went up; they were facing competition, but also Milwaukee cut it so that funding per student in the public schools also went up; also they were slightly less crowded afterward (I think).

There's a lot of behavioral economics suggesting that kids and their families will be much happier with schools they choose even if there's no more than cosmetic difference between the choices to start; and that feeling happiness and loyalty will lead to better school outcomes, all else equal. Hard to sift, though I think it has to be another argument for smaller schools; small enough and there are choices even without busing, even in entirely public system.

The recent flap over charter schools is relevant, too; smaller schools with more group cohesion are also going to be less predictable and occasionally dig themselves into holes, because free of oversight, or by reinforcing their own errors; any experience with groups of humans has examples.

ISBN: 0962959103 (The Teenage Liberation Handbook)

ISBN: 0817939520 (The Future of School Choice)

ISBN: 0817928227 (School Figures)