Equal parts memoir and history, The School That’s Inside You puts an “amen” to the aphorism: Question Authority. The free school movement and the home school movement—both of which re-surfaced during the 1960s and 70s—continue to flourish and to affect changes on today’s educational scene. This book underscores the how and the why of those phenomena.

Politicians and reformers focus on accountability and testing and reduce the meaning of education to preparing youngsters to be mere consumers of goods. Meanwhile, millions of students simply disengage, and gifted teachers exit the field. “Learning is as natural as breathing,” John Holt said. In this book, Pat Montgomery shows what facilitating self-designed learning can mean in the lives of children and of the adults who work with them. A respected teacher, she examined widely-held and largely unquestioned conventions and chose instead to follow her own intuition. Rather than proceed with the tradition of valuing conformity over creativity, she concentrated on seeing the child as the curriculum.

In a democratic society, there ought to be free choice. Not only for adults, but for the very people whom schools purport to serve, children. Her major message is listen and trust. Or get out of the way.