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In the 1960s and early 70s an influential group of education writers wrote accessibly, for the everyday reader, about the colonizing and radically unequalizing effects ofinstitutionalized education on students and adults. To these critics schools were not benign, apple-on-the-desk acculturating institutions where children could innocently be sent each day to learn the skills they needed to succeed in a meritocratic society. Instead they were organizations designed to colonize, imprint, and shape from within the most vulnerable and least powerful individuals in our culture. This book examines the biographies of six important deschooling critics, their questions about the purposes of education, and the nature of powerful learning in their eyes. The book also asks, what do the deschoolers have to tell us now?

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