Anyone who likes this essay would probably enjoy Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education. It's about the historical forces that shaped the evolution of compulsory schooling it America and in other industrialized countries. The book makes some pretty bold claims. For example, "Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned."
An annoying quirk of Gatto is that he usually doesn't cite his sources formally because he thinks making the reader peruse the entire primary text to fact check him encourages intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. That being said, many of the excerpts he uses are now in public domain and take about 30 seconds to Google. (For example Gatto is using the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey to make the above claims, which you can download as a PDF from the National Center of Education Statistics.)
Another good one is John Holt's How Children Learn, in which he says something along the lines of "It's just as well that we don't try to teach children to walk and talk" or else they would struggle to learn that as well.
My wife and I are homeschooling our children for sure...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm
An annoying quirk of Gatto is that he usually doesn't cite his sources formally because he thinks making the reader peruse the entire primary text to fact check him encourages intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. That being said, many of the excerpts he uses are now in public domain and take about 30 seconds to Google. (For example Gatto is using the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey to make the above claims, which you can download as a PDF from the National Center of Education Statistics.)
Anyway the whole book can be found here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm