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ARCHIVE OF REVIEWS
March 2005
A Really Good School: David Gribble
Seven-Ply Yarns, £7.99
A murder story in which the worst school imaginable tries to justify its practices.
Let our Children Learn: Tony Brown, Michael Foot and Peter Holt
Education Now, £8.95
A fascinating account of what happened when three retired teachers with supposedly "old-fashioned" ideas worked together for two days in a primary school.
Leave me Alone: Joanna Gore
Libertarian Education, £6.95
Joanna, as an adult, spent three months in a primary school in the role of a child. What she found out was both predictable and astonishing.
Revolution within: Sammy Kunina
Praxis, £8
Sammy Kunina has a passionately libertarian approach to parenting.
The School I'd Like: Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor
Routledge-Falmer £16.99
The Guardian newspaper invited children to tell them about the school they would like, and this book tells of their responses.
July 2005
Inspecting the Island: Hylda Sims
Seven-ply Yarns, £8.95
The Summerhill novel, as it is called, gives an inside picture of the school in story full of suspense. Hylda Sims is an ex-pupil.
Lifelines: David Gribble
Libertarian Education, £8.95
David Gribble writes of four institutions that prove that freedom in education is not only for the privileged.
January 2006
A Dorset Utopia: The Little Commonwealth and Homer Lane: Judith Stinton
Black Dog Books, £11.95
June 2006
Worlds Apart: David Gribble
Libertarian Education, £8.95
The two worlds in question are traditional schools, on the one hand, and Summerhill and Sands School on the other.
November 2006
Inspiring Schools: Taking up the Challenge of Pupil Participation:
Professor Lynn Davies, Dr Christopher Williams and Hiromi Yamashita with Ko Man-Hing, Available to download from http://www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk/pdf/InspiringSchools_P31.pdf
Summerhill and A.S.Neill
Edited by Mark Vaughan with contributions by Zoë Neill Readhead, Tim Brighouse and Ian Stronach
Open University Press, £18.99
Shattered Lives: Camila Batmanghelidjh
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, £13.99
These are the lives of the London children who the rest of us prefer to despise, evict, punish or ignore.
June 2007
Democratic Schools: Jan Gabbert
€ 10.00 from http://en.democratic-schools.com/order/ or, in the USA, http://www.educationrevolution.org/demdocumentary.html.
A film consisting mostly of intervews at the Berlin IDEC in 2005.
Pretty Cool System: Krätzä
€ 10.00 from http://en.democratic-schools.com/order/
The democratic school of Hadera, seen through the eyes of a group of young people from Germany
Pesta: Leonardo Wild
€ 29.90 from http://www.docushop.at/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Pest a
The Pesta, a school in Ecuador, was one of the most extreme examples of a school where adults avoided influencing children's learning.
What Age can you Start being an Artist: Room 13
£12 from http://www.room13scotland.com/rm13shop.html
The film the children from Caol Primary School made for Channel 4.
Sands School : Luke Flegg:
£7 from theflegg@gmail.com
An ex-pupil's impression.
September 2007
Paradigm Publishers, £18.99
A philosophical argument for a type of education which has long depended on personal feeling and practical experience for its justification.
September 2008
BOOK REVIEW
The Dragonfly Pool, by Eva Ibbotson |