Self-Directed Education
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This book demonstrates how compulsory schooling, with its apparatus of imposed discipline and control, is dangerous to the mental health and social development of children, and is in fact the cause of many social problems which it claims to cure.

This is not a book written by an expert to influence the thinking of other experts. It is based on the accumulated experience of a teacher. One day soon, Shute hopes that it will be possible for children to use schools as he thinks they should be used, as places where any person who happens to need help with their studies can go and receive it.

Until then, Shute confines himself to commenting on schools as they are now, and challenging us to consider whether their regime enslaves the minds of children rather than setting them free.