Two issues ago, senior and Clarion reviews editor Will Elder addressed the oft-unscrutinized college selection process – indeed, Mr. Elder suggested that a college education is not even necessary, through either the power of the degree or the content of instruction, to lead a successful life, financially and spiritually.

Incidentally, I think he has an incredibly good point, and would encourage my readers to further consider their college searching experience and evaluate their preconceptions about what is necessary to have a good education. What he does not address, however, is the issue of primary and secondary schooling, which is the subject of “The Teenage Liberation Handbook,” a self-help guide by Grace Llewellyn.

Llewellyn is a long-time advocate of “unschooling,” a term for what mainstream America knows as homeschooling but refers to a particular type of self-directed education that relies on children’s innate need for learning and self-enrichment to provide knowledge and wisdom that, she claims, is not only stifled but actively suppressed in the classrooms of elementary, middle, and high schools across the world. She counts among her influences John Taylor Gatto, the famed New York State Teacher of the Year who soon after renounced teaching, and John Holt, a pioneer of the unschooling movement.

The thesis of the “Handbook” is this: school, in every form that involves a classroom and an accredited teacher, not only is essential in molding you into a wage-slave every (wo)man to feed the corporate beast, but also stifles any creative curiosity and innate ability to educate yourself. In the terms she couches this in, it’s a very compelling argument.

Full disclosure: this book was the impetus behind my personal decision to register as a homeschooler for the next academic year, despite the fact that I would be a senior and have only handful of credits to complete to satisfy the requirements for graduation and my current college of choice, Evergreen State.

In my experience, the book articulated for me what for the past few years of high school I had been unable to contemplate only in my gut instincts. As many of you know, a teenager thinking with his guts usually has a credibility issue, not only with his parents but also himself, which was why I had refused to believe that I had any recourse but to double my efforts in succeeding in an environment with which I was becoming increasingly disillusioned. What my gut had been trying to tell me, and what Llewellyn shows in heartfelt and supported terms, is that I could not grow as a thinking, feeling person when my confidence depended on grades, my social life depended on an institution, and that school will not become fulfilling if only I suffer a little longer. I realized that I would not become a pretty butterfly emerging from a stifling chrysalis, but instead only weave layer upon layer of self-imprisonment that would last me through the rest of my life.

It is a tortured metaphor like that which tells me that my time would be better spent honing the craft of writing, long my favorite constructive “academic” exercise, rather than constructing a meaningless poem out of lines in my assigned book to form a “found poem.” The assumption that one needs, in this context, to perform this perfunctory exercise to earn “points” on which a “grade” (a loathsome concept to many) is dependent flies in the face of common sense.

Certainly, there are some whom I have told about my plans who ask me, “Why not just get through this last year?” So far, I’ve been unable to just say more than “Because I’m sick of it.” Now, though, I realize what I want to say. I refuse to forfeit what little of my adolescence I have left to continue to subject myself to a program that offers me nothing I cannot find elsewhere. The losses (high school diploma, “social life,” etc.) are far more surmountable than you’d think, and the gains, such as actually caring about what you learn, are incomparable.