Note: starred books are available from Down-to-Earth Books' online bookstore. If Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com don't have some of the others, especially the out-of-print books, they can usually find you a secondhand copy. Let me know if this helps, at maryskole@aol.com - or if I've left out some important ones, OK?
*Summerhill School, A New View of Childhood, by A.S. Neill, edited by Albert Lamb - a new edition of a classic
*The Lives of Children, by George Dennison - the story of the First Street School (NYC), one of the earliest alternative schools
Death at an Early Age, by Jonathan Kozol
Alternative Schools, by Jonathan Kozol
Amazing Grace, by Jonathan Kozol (and several more)
How Children Learn, by John Holt
Why Children Fail, by John Holt
The Underachieving School, by John Holt (and several more)
Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich
After Deschooling, What?, by Ivan Illich
The Vanishing Adolescent, by Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Teacher, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner
Thirty-two Children, by Nat Hentoff
The Storefront, by Ned O'Gorman
The Way it Spozed to be, by Jim Herndon
How to Survive in your Native Land, by Jim Herndon
Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman
Half the House, by Herb Kohl (and several others)
Growing Up Absurd, by Paul Goodman
Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
Worlds in Creation, by Dan Greenberg (and several others)
Kingdom of Childhood - Growing Up at Sudbury Valley School, Mimsy Sadofsky and Dan Greenberg, ed., from interviews by Hanna Greenberg
*Challenging the Giant, the Best of SKOLE, the Journal of Alternative Education, volumes I, II, III and IV
Changing Lives, Voices from a School that Works, by Jane Day, University Press of America, 1994. Available from The Community School, Box 555, Camden, Maine 04843
Compulsory Education and Human Learning, The Moral Failure of Public Education in America and Japan, by Dayle Bethel, ed. (Caddo Gap Press, San Francisco, 1994)
*A Free- Range Childhood: Self-Regulation at Summerhill School, by Matthew Appleton, former Summerhill House Parent
*What Are Schools For? by Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Education Review, founder of "Great Ideas in Education," a brilliant history and analysis of American education from its inception to modern times
The Magical Child, by Joseph Chilton Pearce
Evolution's End, by Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Growth of the Mind, by Stanley I. Greenspan
How Like An Angel Came I Down, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, by A. Bronson Alcott, Introduction and edited by Alice O. Howell, Lindisfarne Press, 1991
A Life in School - What the Teacher Learned - by Jane Tompkins, Duke University professor
*Living by Wonder, the Imaginative Life of Childhood, by Richard Lewis, Founder of The Touchstone Center in New York. See his website at http://www.touchstonecenter.net/
*Making It Up As We Go Along - The Story of the Albany Free School, by Chris Mercogliano
*The Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto
The Exhausted School, John Taylor Gatto, ed.
Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto
*No Master High or Low, by John Shotton, Libertarian Education in Britain 1890 to 1990.
*Real Education, by David Gribble (co-founder and longtime member of the Sands School in England) - the author's personal account of schools in many countries.