100 Books Like Schools Out! The Hidden History of Britain's School Student Strikes

Naomi Novak could write anything, and I would read it, but I am a sucker for dark academia.

Well, this one takes the cake with a school that is actively trying to kill the students. While this book is pretty dark in parts, it was the instances of light that really kept me reading the entire series.

There were many times I wasn’t sure where it would lead, but I was never disappointed by what I discovered.

In the 1960s, radical educational thinkers in the Global North started to question why schools needed to exist at all.

Writers like John Holt, Ivan Illich, and Paul Goodman argued that we should separate ‘education’ from ‘schooling’. Although their views were different, they agreed on a basic set of ideas: children don’t learn much in school; schools are oppressive places, especially for working-class students; and often, they just exist to socialise children for the labour market.

As Holt wrote, "Children are subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail." Lister’s Deschooling Society collects excerpts from these thinkers alongside Lister’s own views. It’s a brilliant introduction to ideas that are still disconcerting today.

Plenty of sociologists have gone into schools and tried to work out what kids think, but few have written about the experience as clearly, directly, and thoughtfully as Corrigan.

Corrigan did research with teenage working-class boys who attended two different schools in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He found, in short, that these boys did not like school; they especially did not like the fact that they were forced to go. This made Corrigan question why we make young people attend institutions that they hate, and which they do not benefit from.

Despite recent ‘progressive’ reforms in education, nothing had changed: ‘they didn’t like [school] when it was all maths and exams; they now didn’t seem to like it when it was all civics and projects’.

Alexander, an anthropologist, spent a year in a comprehensive school in south-east England between 2007 and 2008 (only a couple of years after I left school myself).

He found that a key job of schools in modern British society is to teach students to ‘act their age’. To be a successful student, young people had to fit into the right set of age-norms. They were expected to become more ‘adult’ as they moved up the school, but adopting ‘adult’ behaviours too early could get them into trouble.

Alexander’s book is full of wonderful reflections on ‘growing up’ from young people themselves. Dominic, a sixth-form student, told him: ‘it seems so contrived in some people, you know, they’re like “well I’m an adult, I’ll act like this!... yeah well I’m 18 so I better… you know”’.

In the past few decades, politicians and pundits have worked hard to craft our collective memory of the 1980s. Many promote it was a golden age of small government, a booming economy, and a strong, morally-centered foreign policy. Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes acts as a corollary to this interpretation. Covering aspects of domestic protests, the antinuclear movement, battles over the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and the backlash to Reagan’s foreign policies in Central America and elsewhere, Hunt explores another side of the 1980s Cold War. His book’s title is taken from an off-the-cuff joke Reagan made about destroying the Soviet Union. Doing so at such a tense time in U.S. foreign relations made Reagan’s gaff one that alarmed observers at home and abroad--a testament to how tense the era really was.

This is a fascinating book that deals with one of the central dilemmas in American history—that a nation committed to high ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a republic made up of people from several lands could also be a nation committed to racial oppression and the denial of fundamental rights. It considers citizenship not as noun but as verb—a dynamic process, not just a legal affiliation. Spires gets at the complexity of American life, explaining approaches to citizenship that required savvy improvisation, community formation, and determined commitment to ideals that were violated by the dominant culture at every turn. Spires explores the tensions, the disagreements over directions and methods, that were part of this collective effort, and the concepts of citizenship that emerged from those productive debates. Among a great many other things, readers will learn a lot about African American intellectual life, writing, and… show more.

Alice Mattison, the author, must have been reading my mind! This piercing novel echoes some of my conflicted feelings about the Sixties and social activism in general, even as it also probes the strains of long-term marriage and friendship. As college students, Olive, Helen, and Val took different routes during the Sixties antiwar protests. Now, when a magazine commissions Olive to write an essay about Val’s long-ago novel, she must confront the repercussions of those friendships and the decisions the three women made. Helen chose violent protest; Olive chose a PhD; Val chose to appropriate Helen’s life in her fiction. Olive’s rethinking raises a question that’s important for us today: How far should an ethical person go for a just cause?  

I found this book very interesting as it re-examines the early period of the Communist movement in Egypt. The history of Egyptian Communism has been extensively studied, but Ginat’s book was able to bring something new to the discussion by analysing previously unstudied Soviet archives. He demonstrates the important role Eastern European and native Jews played in the movement's early days—a role that subsequent generations of Communist historians had largely edited out. The book is rich with detail and provides a genuine insight into the motivations and hopes of those Jewish activists who thought they were building a better world on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Have you heard of “Yes Men”, possibly the most inspiring and creative contemporary group of American activists? People who made powerful corporations like VW look ridiculous and excuse for their emission scandal cheating, and very same people who have shut down the WTO? If “yes”, learn about the coolest tools they and other pranksters have used to empower themselves to change the world. If “no” take this book, buckle up for a wild ride and find an activist toolbox for making your community a better place.

Showing the wonders of our world, One Earth is a counting book told in lyrical, rhyming verse that counts up to 10 and back down again.

This book is geared toward the youngest reader with little text and gorgeous illustrations by Rogerio Coelho. Two children walk through field and forest, mountains and shorelines to show the wonders of nature as she counts up to ten.

Counting down from 10 to one, the text features conservation, repurposing, repairing, and recycling, emphasizing we have one, just one, Earth. The message is, take care of it