Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn

I wanted to rate Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn more highly, but, as many things as it gets right, it has room for improvement.

Author Heather Camlot and illustrator Erin Taniguchi have combined to create a book about people through history and around the world who have started secret, or not so secret, schools.
The 15 stories are arranged into chapters focusing on five reasons for secret schools: “Cultural Connections — Protecting One’s Identity”, “Hope and Dignity — Escaping Slavery and Oppression”, “Girls’ Rights — Banding Together for Gender Equality”, “Spy School —Going Underground and Undercover”, and “Radical Learning — Moving in a New Direction”.

The first three chapters are clearly stories about the determination to learn, as indicated by the subtitle of the book, “True Stories of the Determination to Learn”.

“Cultural Connections — Protecting One’s Identity” includes stories about secret schools in Lithuania, Brazil, and Ecuador where Indigenous and migrant workers sought to maintain their languages and cultures. “A World Apart” tells the story of Japanese migrant workers in Brazil. Although “teaching foreign languages to children under 14-years- old was banned”, World War II made everything worse.

Still, the underground Japanese schooling managed to continue, even though families had to hide their teaching materials by burying them and Japanese language teachers would be arrested if found teaching. (Pp. 10-11)

“Hope and Dignity — Escaping Slavery and Oppression” includes the story of Frederick Douglass as an enslaved child in the American South. Secretly taught to read by the wife of a slave owner, Douglass “began secretly teaching other enslaved people to read and write — he even had as many as forty students in a Sunday class. At the age twenty, Douglass escaped to freedom and became a prominent abolitionist, human rights leader, and author.” (p. 16)

“Girls’ Rights — Banding Together for Gender Equality” includes the story of an open secret school in Iran.

Though she herself had little education, secret society member Mahrukh Gawharshinas founded the Taraqqi Girls’ School in 1911. As for that open secret: while the public may have known about the Taraqqi Girls’ School, Gawharshinas had to keep it secret from her husband, who objected to education for women. When he found out two years later, he was livid. Not only did he disapprove, but he also told her she had brought shame upon the family.

She kept the school open anyway. (p. 27)

The connections to the determination to learn are less clear in the last two chapters.

Spy School — Going Underground and Undercover

Secret. Covert. Undercover. All of these words might make you think of spies. But they’re also words that could describe the schools that train the spies used by governments to protect their citizens from outside enemy forces and threats within their own borders. (pp. 30-31)

Included in this chapter is a story about Camp X, a “deadly school for dirty warfare” (p. 34). Camp X was a secret training camp set up near Whitby, Ontario, in 1941. Another of the stories is about the KGB, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security, and the third story is about the “top-secret Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL)”. (p. 36)

While each of these clearly describes a secret school, the reasons why they were a secret seem very far removed from “determination to learn”. No outside force was keeping the participants in these schools from learning.

In the final chapter, “Radical Learning: Moving in a New Direction”, is a story about Ad Astra, an unconventional school begun by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla car manufacturer.

The anti-establishment school that began with just eight students gathering in an office conference room had classrooms and a lab for upward of forty students by 2018. (p. 42)

Although Ad Astra had very limited enrolment, anti-establishment schools run for a few years by celebrities are not secret, and they are hardly in the same category with many of the other schools where students and families put themselves at risk to learn.

I want this book to be more than it is. I want it to be about the determination to overcome obstacles to learn. Perhaps that was never the author’s intention, but, at the end, I’m left feeling like the collection of stories is slightly lessened by the broad interpretation of “Determination to Learn”.

Also, lowering the overall suitability of this book for young readers is the absence of an index and a glossary. Some words, such as “haciendas” are explained within the text but others, such as “apartheid” and “abolitionist”, are not. The “Notes” section cites the sources of quotations used, providing a good example for young students. The “Selected Bibliography” is impressive but does not seem geared to young students.

Example:

González Terreros, Maria Isabel. “Las escuelas clandestinas en Ecuador. Raices de la educación indígena intercultural.” Revista Colombiana de Educación, no 69, 2015, pp. 75-95. Online.

Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn may appeal to students who prefer nonfiction to fiction. The information is interesting and presented in short sections. I struggled with some of the stories, such as “Talking in Circles”, due to my lack of historic knowledge about some parts of the world. I wonder how many of the stories require more background knowledge than many students will have at this age. Of course, different students will probably have more background knowledge than I do about the different histories and cultures.

Although I recommend Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn due to the many things it gets right, it could have been better.