The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn

Live in the poorest neighborhoods in order to learn how to get along in the world and to save money, so I can travel to a different continent each year. Create my own personal bible, almanac, and telephone book. Create lists, make charts, and undertake the most ambitious projects I can think of. Spend the rest of the time in the library and on the Internet. Seek out hundreds of mentors to help me find answers to my thousands of questions.

Attend a different place of worship every week. Here’s my curriculum: Live in a different city every year. Tuition is free, and everybody designs his or her own major. It has billions of professors, tens of millions of books, and unlimited course offerings. So I quit college and enrolled as a student at the University of Planet Earth, the world’s oldest and largest educational institution. Those are the things that enhance or mess up people’s lives, not whether they know economic theory or can analyze literature. No classes on how to build an organization, raise money, navigate a bureaucracy, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, ask the right questions, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what’s important. When I returned to Oberlin that fall, I realized that there were no courses covering the things I most wanted to learn. But I ended up buying the book and was struck by Llewellyn’s argument that learning happens naturally and school mostly just gets in the way. I’m not a teenager, was my first thought, and I already have a real life, thanks anyway. “That one!” she said without hesitation, pointing to The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. Then one summer day three years ago, I visited Reading Frenzy, a little bookstore in Portland, Oregon, and asked the owner what her favorite books were. So I stayed in high school and then headed off to Oberlin College, but my desire to pursue other avenues of education persisted. And, in retrospect, I admit I was a little scared. Having spent all my life in schools where knowledge is measured out in tiny spoonfuls, I wasn’t resourceful enough to figure out they were wrong.

I informed my parents that I intended to do the same, and they told me it was illegal.

When I was 14, my hero was a rapper named KRS-One who dropped out of eighth grade and educated himself by reading and apprenticing in the music business. I highly recommend his excellent books Bomb The Suburbs and No More Prisons. This is essay is reprinted with permission from the author William Upski Wimsatt.

The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn