Youth

One of the homeschooling movement’s foremost pioneers, John Holt, was an egalitarian atheist who explicitly opposed patriarchy, corresponded with progressive thinkers and helped initiate the still emerging children’s rights movement.

Michelle Bachelet’s return to the presidency, and her promise for structural changes to Chile’s educational and political system, is the result of a decades-long struggle to move out of the shadow of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, and is one of the fruits of the more recent student movement for a better society.

In September 1948, when delegates to the young United Nations met at the grand Palais de Chailot in Paris, a twenty-something American wearing the flak jacket of a bomber pilot pitched a tent on the Palais steps. Guards descended and angrily ordered him to leave, but he politely declined. I’m no longer in France, the man explained, eyes twinkling. I’m standing on “international territory.”

Faced with shuttered schools and top-down, profit-motivated reforms, parents and students in Chicago, Ill., are looking to autonomous pedagogical alternatives. The Washington Park Freedom School offers free, community-based education on Chicago's South Side.

High school's tough enough without having to face prison time for refusing to serve an occupation you know is wrong.