Damage Limitation: Trying to Reduce the Harm Schools Do to Children

Roland Meighan
Educational Heretics Press, Paperback, £9.95

Reviewed by Mandy Vere

While reading this, I bored everyone within reach by insisting on quoting passages – it’s that kind of book. Having left school in 1973 when progressive ideas seemed on the rise, and being horrified twenty years later when my own children entered the schooling system at how far things had regressed, I and my kids have battled through the system, fighting some, intervening some, resigning ourselves some to the inhumanities encountered. If you’re not able or inclined to opt out into home education, then damage limitation is often the only way forward, and this book is an inspiration - partly to reaffirm what you’ve had a sneaking suspicion of all along, that, as John Holt says “school is the army for kids”, partly to give you strategies to support your young ones, and partly to remember that their real education is mostly happening outside or despite school. It’s full of quotes, e.g. Mark Twain: “I have never allowed schooling to interfere with my education”, personal accounts and analysis. If you want an antidote to the exam fever and stultifying boredom/abuse of school, here it is.