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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
October 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Toxic Schooling: How Schools Became Worse, by Clive Harber
January 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A Good Childhood, by Richard Layard and Judy Dunn
FILM REVIEW
We are the People We've Been Waiting For, A film made by the Edge Foundation, under the guidance of Lord Puttnam.
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