Weekend Reading Roundup (30 May 2017)

[nanila]

How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

[nanila]

Unexpectedly, I did have a bit of time to myself to read this weekend. I got about halfway through Utopia for Realists, which makes a pretty compelling case for a basic universal income.

[nou]

I can't work out whether I want to read this or not. On the one hand, yay utopia, but on the other, the contrast between his ideas and the current situation is pretty depressing.

(I still haven’t quite got over reading John Holt as a kid in the 1980s, getting all excited over the idea that someone had worked out how to make school less awful, then finding out that this was originally published in the 1960s and schools weren’t going to be fixed after all.)

[nanila]

The feeling I get whilst reading it is exhilaratingly hopeful. And then I open literally any other form of media, social or news or magazine or whatever, and the faintness of the possibility that this will at any point in the near future become reality smacks me between the eyes.

Despite this, I'd like to read John Holt now.

[nou]

Yep, I don't think I can cope with the highs and lows of exhilarating hopefulness versus violent reality right now :(

John Holt is definitely worth reading. I read my parents’ copy of How Children Fail as a child, and got my own copy of How Children Learn as an adult.