Overview of the book

This book is about how secondary schools can seriously damage the health of young people and can continue to affect them as adults. But it is also about how secondary schooling can be modified to avoid this damage and benefit young people's health and learning.

In human evolution and history, schools are a recent innovation and quite a strange one. If brought back to life, prehistoric hunter-gatherers or even medieval merchants would be amazed and probably baffled by our approach to socialising the young by separating them off from everyday society in special institutions, sorting them into classes by age and putting them under the guidance of a single adult at the front of the class. The historical norm for socialising the young was through participating in society, being attached to social groups mixing the old and the young, and learning through observing, copying and improving on what they saw others doing. Schools have developed gradually over the last couple of centuries, with initially only the European White male gentry going to school to prepare to become gentlemen and various sorts of boss. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that secondary schooling became the norm in Europe and North America, and this is only now becoming the norm across the rest of the world.