The Teenage Liberation Handbook -an overview
Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2026 4:08 pm
THE TEENAGE LIBERATION HANDBOOK; How To Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education
by Grace Llewellyn; Lowry House Publishers; Eugene, Oregon U.S.A. 1991
(Note: a semi-recent search for Grace turned up NOTHING online. She has apparently been completely suppressed (?) from the Internet. Who knows why. I don't know her and never met her knowingly. Nor do i know anyone else in the Ann Arbor Youth Liberation group or CHIPS, even tho the spooks here will probably lie and say i do! i WISH i did, tho, because had i known them, i CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE joined up with them! And CERTAINLY would have joined up had i known about them when i was a kid!!!! (Even tho they had an ideologically confining position of sorts)
i'm thinking there's no legal copyright problems with this, since it was published over 17 years ago. But just in case, i pray that everyone inclined will copy it ASAP!
The following has been taken from a flier of which some of the text from the book was put on and handed out around the U.S. to help promote critical thought. If you like the basic idea, please feel free to copy and distribute this page and "hand it out" wherever you are! Note: we are providing this because we want to promote such ideas, but we do not represent Lowry House or gain any commission from them.
The usual adult person in America thinks it's terribly hard to teach yourself something, and if you want to learn something, you've got to find somebody to teach it to you. This leads to the idea that kids are dumb unless taught or unless they go to school.(...)
"THE TEENAGE LIBERATION HANDBOOK is a very dangerous book. It contradicts all the conventional wisdom about dropouts and the importance of formal education. It is funny and inspiring. Do not, under any circumstances, share this book with a bright, frustrated high-schooler being ground into mind fudge by the school system. This writer cannot be responsible for the happiness and sense of personal responsiblity that might come from reading this book."--Bloomsbury Review
"Comparing me to those who are conventionally schooled," writes twelve-year-old Colin Roch, "Is like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot."
Did your guidance counselor ever tell you to consider quitting school? That you have choices, quite beyond lifelong hamburger flipping or inner-city crack dealing? That legally you can find a way out of school, that once you're out you'll learn and grow better, faster, and more naturally than you ever did in school, that there are zillions of alternatives, that you can quit school and still go to A Good College and even have a Real Life in the Suburbs if you so desire? Just in case your counselor never told you these things, I'm going to. That's what this book is for.
Whom it's for: As the title gently implies, this is a book for teenagers, though their parents and little brothers are welcome too. If you are nine and want to use this book to get free, more power to you. If you are eleven and think of yourself as a teenager, that's fine with me too.
(...) If you quit school, you too will probably wish to call yourself a homeschooler, at least when you talk to the school board. But that doesn't require bringing the ugliness of school into your home, or transforming your parents into teachers. Nor, for that matter, does it require that you stay home. The idea is to catch more of the world, not less. To avoid these kinds of connotations, I usually use the term unschooling. But be aware that many people who talk about homeschooling mean the same thing I do when I say unschooling.
This is not a book specifically about Christian homeschooling, although most Christians will find it as useful as anyone else. I point this out because many people associate homeschooling with fundamentalist Christianity and Fear of Darwin. Many homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians, which has some heavy impact on what they do instead of school school. Many others, however, are agnostics, mellow Christians, Jews, pagans, atheists, and Buddhists. Help yourself to any religious belief that you like, but in these pages I won't be suggesting that you read your Bible instead of a biology book.
What it is:
This book is a wild card, a shot in the dark, a hopeful prayer.
This book wants you to quit school and do what you love. Yes, I know, that's the weirdest thing you ever heard. Hoping to make this idea feel possible to you, I tell about teenagers who are already living happy lives without school, and I offer lots of ideas and strategies to help you get a real life and convince your adults to cooperate.
"Excuse me?" you interrupt, "Quit school? Right. And throw away my future and pump gas all my life and get Addicted to Drugs and be totally lost in today's world. Right."
If you said that, please feel free to march straight to the nearest schoolperson and receive a bushel of gold stars, extra credit points, and proud smiles. You've learned exactly what they taught you. After you get tired of sticking stars to your locker, do please come back and read further.
This book is built on the belief that life is wonderful and schools are stifling. It is built on an impassioned belief in freedom. And it is built on the belief that schools do the opposite of what they say they do. They prevent learning and they destroy one's love of learning.
Of course, there are hundreds of other books with similar premises. Some of these books go on to suggest that if certain changes were made, or smarter teachers were hired, schools would be good places. Other books say compulsory schools are fundamentally bad places and society, or at least individual people, should abandon them. This book agrees with that, but it doesn't stop there.
This is a practical book--a book for individual teenagers, a real-life handbook meant to be used and acted on.
"If you look at the history of "freedom", you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they ...believe that [their] bondage is "normal" and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different."
I have no hope that the school system will change enough to make schools healthy places, until it makes school blatantly optional. But I have plenty of faith that people--you, your friends--can intelligently take greater control over their own lives. So this book bypasses the rigid, uncreative red tape of that System and instead speaks directly to you.
(...)
The most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent what you think. In school you can't control your own life. Outside of school you can, at least to the extent that your parents trust you to.
"Comparing me to those who are conventionally schooled," writes twelve-year-old Colin Roch, "Is like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot."
The ultimate goal of this book is for you to start associating the concept of freedom with you, and to start wondering why you and your friends don't have much of it, and for you to move out of the busy-prison into the meadows of life. There are lots of good reasons to quit school, but to my idealistic American mind, the pursuit of freedom encompasses most of them and outshines the others.
If you look at the history of "freedom", you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they learn to take their bondage for granted, and to believe that this bondage is "normal" and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different. There was a time when many black slaves took a sort of pride--or talked as if they took pride--in how well-behaved and hard-working they were. There was a time when most women believed--or talked as if they believed--that they should obey and submit to their husbands. In fact, people within an oppressed group often internalize their oppression so much that they are crueler, and more judgmental, to their peers than the oppressors themselves are. In China, men made deformed female feet into sexual fetishes, but women tied the cords on their own daughters' feet.
Obviously, black and female people eventually caught sight of a greater vision for themselves, and change blazed through their minds, through laws, through public attitudes. All is not yet well, but the United States is now far kinder to people of color and mammary glands than it was 100 years ago. What's more, these people are kinder to themselves. They dream bigger dreams, and flesh out grander lives, than picking cotton for the master or fixing a martini for the husband.
Right now, a lot of you are helping history to repeat itself; you don't believe you should be free. Of course you want to be free--in various ways, not just free of school. However, society gives you so many condescending, false, and harmful messages about yourselves that most of you wouldn't trust your selves with freedom. It's all complicated by the fact that the people who infringe most dangerously and inescapably on your freedom are those who say they are helping you, those who are convinced you need their help: teachers, school counselors, perhaps your parents.
Why should you have freedom?
Why should anyone? To become human, to live fully. Insofar as you live what someone else dictates, you do not live. Choice is a fundamental essence of life, and in the fullest life, each choice is deliberate and savored.
Another reason you should be free is obvious. You should learn to live responsibly and joyfully in a free country.
Authority.
Regardless of what the law or your teachers have to say about this, you are as human as anyone over the age of eighteen or twenty-one. Yet, "minors" are one of the most oppressed groups of people in the US, and certainly the most discriminated against legally. A quote from this source:
"The child's legal status is an amalgam of non-citizen, slave, overprotected pet, and valuable chattel"--William Aikman of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute
(1972)
All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school...you do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. ...The most constant and thorough thing students in school experience--and learn--is the antithesis of democracy.
(...)
Are there any good reasons you shouldn't have freedom?
(...) A wise friend of mine, who grew up in Germany under Hitler and later did time in American prison camps, startled me with a different reason you shouldn't have freedom. First, he agreed that schools are the antithesis of freedom. Then he said, but how can you really appreciate the freedom that comes with adulthood in a democracy, if you never know what it's like to live without it? I thought a lot about what he said, but I ended up deciding that a twelve year experiential lesson in bondage doesn't make freedom seem precious; it makes it seem impossible. It also misrepresents the nature of learning. After school, too many people continue to slap chains on themselves. Before school, nobody is so self-hating. Maybe after we abolish compulsory schooling in the twenty-first century we can set up voluntary month-long camps where people sit at desks and obey, just so they realize how lucky they are not to live their lives that way, just so they promise themselves to always live in celebration of their freedom.
Maybe you believe you aren't ready for freedom?
On some level, no one ever is; it's not a matter of age. People of all ages make mistakes with their freedom--becoming involved with destructive friends, choosing college majors they're not deeply interested in, buying houses with rotten foundations, clearcutting forests, breaking good marriages for dumb reasons. People cause tremendous pain and disaster, and you will never be so wise or perfect that you don't do stupid things. Sure, teenagers make mistakes. So do adults, and it seems to me adults have a harder time admitting and fixing theirs. While you are young, perhaps you are more likely to break your arm falling off a horse, but you are less likely to cause an oil spill or start a useless war.
(...)
Of course, some places we call school are less schoolish than others. I feel pretty strongly that even the most alternative school, as long as it is compulsory, is not a healthy place to be. But I'd be an idiot to say every single school is bad for every single person. If you go to a humane school, and love it, even in May, and have a gut feeling that it's a good and healthy place, stay there. I hope I never tell anyone to ignore their gut feelings. I always listen to mine, and usually act on them. Of course, you have to make sure you're not confusing fear and deeply imbedded guilt with your true feelings.
by Grace Llewellyn; Lowry House Publishers; Eugene, Oregon U.S.A. 1991
(Note: a semi-recent search for Grace turned up NOTHING online. She has apparently been completely suppressed (?) from the Internet. Who knows why. I don't know her and never met her knowingly. Nor do i know anyone else in the Ann Arbor Youth Liberation group or CHIPS, even tho the spooks here will probably lie and say i do! i WISH i did, tho, because had i known them, i CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE joined up with them! And CERTAINLY would have joined up had i known about them when i was a kid!!!! (Even tho they had an ideologically confining position of sorts)
i'm thinking there's no legal copyright problems with this, since it was published over 17 years ago. But just in case, i pray that everyone inclined will copy it ASAP!
The following has been taken from a flier of which some of the text from the book was put on and handed out around the U.S. to help promote critical thought. If you like the basic idea, please feel free to copy and distribute this page and "hand it out" wherever you are! Note: we are providing this because we want to promote such ideas, but we do not represent Lowry House or gain any commission from them.
The usual adult person in America thinks it's terribly hard to teach yourself something, and if you want to learn something, you've got to find somebody to teach it to you. This leads to the idea that kids are dumb unless taught or unless they go to school.(...)
"THE TEENAGE LIBERATION HANDBOOK is a very dangerous book. It contradicts all the conventional wisdom about dropouts and the importance of formal education. It is funny and inspiring. Do not, under any circumstances, share this book with a bright, frustrated high-schooler being ground into mind fudge by the school system. This writer cannot be responsible for the happiness and sense of personal responsiblity that might come from reading this book."--Bloomsbury Review
"Comparing me to those who are conventionally schooled," writes twelve-year-old Colin Roch, "Is like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot."
Did your guidance counselor ever tell you to consider quitting school? That you have choices, quite beyond lifelong hamburger flipping or inner-city crack dealing? That legally you can find a way out of school, that once you're out you'll learn and grow better, faster, and more naturally than you ever did in school, that there are zillions of alternatives, that you can quit school and still go to A Good College and even have a Real Life in the Suburbs if you so desire? Just in case your counselor never told you these things, I'm going to. That's what this book is for.
Whom it's for: As the title gently implies, this is a book for teenagers, though their parents and little brothers are welcome too. If you are nine and want to use this book to get free, more power to you. If you are eleven and think of yourself as a teenager, that's fine with me too.
(...) If you quit school, you too will probably wish to call yourself a homeschooler, at least when you talk to the school board. But that doesn't require bringing the ugliness of school into your home, or transforming your parents into teachers. Nor, for that matter, does it require that you stay home. The idea is to catch more of the world, not less. To avoid these kinds of connotations, I usually use the term unschooling. But be aware that many people who talk about homeschooling mean the same thing I do when I say unschooling.
This is not a book specifically about Christian homeschooling, although most Christians will find it as useful as anyone else. I point this out because many people associate homeschooling with fundamentalist Christianity and Fear of Darwin. Many homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians, which has some heavy impact on what they do instead of school school. Many others, however, are agnostics, mellow Christians, Jews, pagans, atheists, and Buddhists. Help yourself to any religious belief that you like, but in these pages I won't be suggesting that you read your Bible instead of a biology book.
What it is:
This book is a wild card, a shot in the dark, a hopeful prayer.
This book wants you to quit school and do what you love. Yes, I know, that's the weirdest thing you ever heard. Hoping to make this idea feel possible to you, I tell about teenagers who are already living happy lives without school, and I offer lots of ideas and strategies to help you get a real life and convince your adults to cooperate.
"Excuse me?" you interrupt, "Quit school? Right. And throw away my future and pump gas all my life and get Addicted to Drugs and be totally lost in today's world. Right."
If you said that, please feel free to march straight to the nearest schoolperson and receive a bushel of gold stars, extra credit points, and proud smiles. You've learned exactly what they taught you. After you get tired of sticking stars to your locker, do please come back and read further.
This book is built on the belief that life is wonderful and schools are stifling. It is built on an impassioned belief in freedom. And it is built on the belief that schools do the opposite of what they say they do. They prevent learning and they destroy one's love of learning.
Of course, there are hundreds of other books with similar premises. Some of these books go on to suggest that if certain changes were made, or smarter teachers were hired, schools would be good places. Other books say compulsory schools are fundamentally bad places and society, or at least individual people, should abandon them. This book agrees with that, but it doesn't stop there.
This is a practical book--a book for individual teenagers, a real-life handbook meant to be used and acted on.
"If you look at the history of "freedom", you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they ...believe that [their] bondage is "normal" and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different."
I have no hope that the school system will change enough to make schools healthy places, until it makes school blatantly optional. But I have plenty of faith that people--you, your friends--can intelligently take greater control over their own lives. So this book bypasses the rigid, uncreative red tape of that System and instead speaks directly to you.
(...)
The most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent what you think. In school you can't control your own life. Outside of school you can, at least to the extent that your parents trust you to.
"Comparing me to those who are conventionally schooled," writes twelve-year-old Colin Roch, "Is like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot."
The ultimate goal of this book is for you to start associating the concept of freedom with you, and to start wondering why you and your friends don't have much of it, and for you to move out of the busy-prison into the meadows of life. There are lots of good reasons to quit school, but to my idealistic American mind, the pursuit of freedom encompasses most of them and outshines the others.
If you look at the history of "freedom", you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they learn to take their bondage for granted, and to believe that this bondage is "normal" and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different. There was a time when many black slaves took a sort of pride--or talked as if they took pride--in how well-behaved and hard-working they were. There was a time when most women believed--or talked as if they believed--that they should obey and submit to their husbands. In fact, people within an oppressed group often internalize their oppression so much that they are crueler, and more judgmental, to their peers than the oppressors themselves are. In China, men made deformed female feet into sexual fetishes, but women tied the cords on their own daughters' feet.
Obviously, black and female people eventually caught sight of a greater vision for themselves, and change blazed through their minds, through laws, through public attitudes. All is not yet well, but the United States is now far kinder to people of color and mammary glands than it was 100 years ago. What's more, these people are kinder to themselves. They dream bigger dreams, and flesh out grander lives, than picking cotton for the master or fixing a martini for the husband.
Right now, a lot of you are helping history to repeat itself; you don't believe you should be free. Of course you want to be free--in various ways, not just free of school. However, society gives you so many condescending, false, and harmful messages about yourselves that most of you wouldn't trust your selves with freedom. It's all complicated by the fact that the people who infringe most dangerously and inescapably on your freedom are those who say they are helping you, those who are convinced you need their help: teachers, school counselors, perhaps your parents.
Why should you have freedom?
Why should anyone? To become human, to live fully. Insofar as you live what someone else dictates, you do not live. Choice is a fundamental essence of life, and in the fullest life, each choice is deliberate and savored.
Another reason you should be free is obvious. You should learn to live responsibly and joyfully in a free country.
Authority.
Regardless of what the law or your teachers have to say about this, you are as human as anyone over the age of eighteen or twenty-one. Yet, "minors" are one of the most oppressed groups of people in the US, and certainly the most discriminated against legally. A quote from this source:
"The child's legal status is an amalgam of non-citizen, slave, overprotected pet, and valuable chattel"--William Aikman of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute
(1972)
All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school...you do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. ...The most constant and thorough thing students in school experience--and learn--is the antithesis of democracy.
(...)
Are there any good reasons you shouldn't have freedom?
(...) A wise friend of mine, who grew up in Germany under Hitler and later did time in American prison camps, startled me with a different reason you shouldn't have freedom. First, he agreed that schools are the antithesis of freedom. Then he said, but how can you really appreciate the freedom that comes with adulthood in a democracy, if you never know what it's like to live without it? I thought a lot about what he said, but I ended up deciding that a twelve year experiential lesson in bondage doesn't make freedom seem precious; it makes it seem impossible. It also misrepresents the nature of learning. After school, too many people continue to slap chains on themselves. Before school, nobody is so self-hating. Maybe after we abolish compulsory schooling in the twenty-first century we can set up voluntary month-long camps where people sit at desks and obey, just so they realize how lucky they are not to live their lives that way, just so they promise themselves to always live in celebration of their freedom.
Maybe you believe you aren't ready for freedom?
On some level, no one ever is; it's not a matter of age. People of all ages make mistakes with their freedom--becoming involved with destructive friends, choosing college majors they're not deeply interested in, buying houses with rotten foundations, clearcutting forests, breaking good marriages for dumb reasons. People cause tremendous pain and disaster, and you will never be so wise or perfect that you don't do stupid things. Sure, teenagers make mistakes. So do adults, and it seems to me adults have a harder time admitting and fixing theirs. While you are young, perhaps you are more likely to break your arm falling off a horse, but you are less likely to cause an oil spill or start a useless war.
(...)
Of course, some places we call school are less schoolish than others. I feel pretty strongly that even the most alternative school, as long as it is compulsory, is not a healthy place to be. But I'd be an idiot to say every single school is bad for every single person. If you go to a humane school, and love it, even in May, and have a gut feeling that it's a good and healthy place, stay there. I hope I never tell anyone to ignore their gut feelings. I always listen to mine, and usually act on them. Of course, you have to make sure you're not confusing fear and deeply imbedded guilt with your true feelings.