The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to quit school and get a real life and education

by Grace Llewellyn

The Teenage Liberation Handbook is a guide (it is full of practical information!) for children and young adults (and everyone!) about how to liberate themselves by taking their education into their own hands and refusing to be indoctrinated into obedience and servitude. One of Grace Llewellyn's main points is that mandatory schooling's primary purpose is not to educate but to teach obedience and other skills required to hold a job such as sitting still for extended periods of time and listening to someone tell you what to do.

Quoting from a quote from American Education: The National Experience by A. Cremin found in the book on page 350

[Factories] Required a shift from agricultural time to the much more precise categories of industrial time, with it's sharply delineated and periodized workday. Moreover, along with this shift in rhythm, the factory demanded concomitant shifts in habits and attention and behaviour, under which workers could no longer act according to whim or preference but were required instead to adjust to the needs of the productive process and the other workers involved in it...The schools taught [factory behaviour], not only through textbook preachments, but also through the very character of their organization--the grouping, periodizing, and objective impersonality were not unlike those of the factory.

Llewellyn posits that instead of supporting a child's natural curiosity schools deaden the will to learn by stealing children's time and energy. Essentially preparing children for a life of servitude and an instinct to obey. "How strange and self defeating that a supposedly free country should train its young for life in totalitarianism (pg.38.)"