It’s rare for me to wholeheartedly endorse a book as being important enough that every parent should read it, but I’ve just finished one that’s as close to that designation as I’m ever going to find. It’s Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With Or Without School, by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver.
I don’t even know where to start. I think I highlighted most of the book. I just tried to go back through my Kindle to figure out what parts of the book I should write about, and it seems I marked 265 passages, some of which are multiple pages long.
Basically, Llewellyn and Silver make the point that, even if your children are enrolled in school, you can go a long way toward improving their educational experience with your own positive influence and support. (Yes, I partly like their book because it reminds me so much of my own.) After laying out their thoughts on what doesn’t work about the traditional school system and why you should stop stressing about “high-stakes” testing and other fabricated perils of mainstream “education,” they go through each school subject area (science, math, history…) and provide suggestions for how to naturally and dynamically engage your child in that subject. Their resource lists provide an incredible collection of books that you might want to read next.
This book is applicable for anyone with children, no matter what types of school they do or don’t attend.
Llewellyn is renowned for her pioneering work in the homeschooling and unschooling worlds. She’s the mastermind behind the Not Back to School Camp, for unschooled teenagers, and the author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education and Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don’t Go to School Tell Their Own Stories.