Excerpts from Rise of the Pirate Classes — Freedom from Mental Manacles

We still had to get all the other parents to agree at least to considering the proposal before anything could go forward.

I felt that it fell to me then.  Such sudden wonderful visions of hope could end up vanishing just as easily.  We were asking a lot.  Even Jenny with her books and works on alternative education could find no precedent for what we were proposing.  It all depended on my proposal and I therefore at least needed to produce something that would convince all our parents that we would work better together than we did at school.  I wasn’t sure I could do that but I was absolutely determined, particularly if it meant never having to dread Mondays again.  I never worked so hard.

. . .

[Once the four kids get their school approved provisionally:]

This was bliss!  Sunday no longer murked under the shadow of impending misery; the galley slaves were no longer chained to their desks and no Sunday was ever quite as brilliantly dazzling.  In a fit of compensatory fervor, I spent the whole day working with words — listening to lectures from Oxford, MIT and Stanford, looking up words, playing vocabulary games.  By the end of the day I had actually once managed to get up to level 49 out of 60 in an online vocabulary quiz game.  I probably learnt more than I had all semester and now had over 300 new words in my vocabulary journal and had learnt them all.

I was a bit embarrassed to be seen studying by my parents but they were indulgent when I asked for privacy.  Without a Monday to dread, I continued to enjoy myself well into the night.  This had indeed been the greatest day of my life as I reveled in the thought that Monday in its worst sense might not ever come again.  In the same way that the dread of approaching September had always destroyed the joy of late summer with anticipation of impending enforced confinement and drudgery, Mondays had ever deprived Sundays of much their delight, reducing their function to that of a salutary buffer that protected Saturdays from succumbing to a similar fate.  From this point on, my new school life promised to make September and Mondays into something quite different.  As time passed, they would start to become eagerly anticipated goals but that was also soon to vanish into an even more sublime state as September and Mondays both lost all significance.  This was only a natural consequence of both June and Friday having lost theirs.  Our weeks, days and nights would cease conforming to a schedule and we would find ourselves always eager to start and reluctant to relinquish working with our chosen enthusiasm of the moment.  These were to leak into all of our lives and permeate them.  I prefer not to think of it as “school”, a concept to which they would come to bear little resemblance, but the word continues to be used for purely practical reasons.