Honor Student

At a typical public high school in an average American city, a student is asking questions his teachers cannot answer. To his guidance counselor, his behavior is inexplicable and unnerving. To his father, the school principal, he is an embarrassment. To the future of government-controlled education, he is a threat. Kevin Saunders should be a straight-A student, yet he is failing his easiest classes as if by design.
Honor Student, first published in 1989, is the story of a young man's fight for ownership of his mind, and of an ex-teacher's struggle against self-betrayal. Its theme is addressed to anyone who has ever attended public school, but particularly to those whose minds may yet survive it. The struggle it portrays is real. The ammunition employed by its heroes is available to any aware honest person. The stakes are not pass or fail, but freedom or subjugation.
Despite alleged good intentions and beneficent trappings there is a mind-crippling contradiction inherent in state-controlled education. The system is politically manipulated, coercively funded, and intellectually bankrupt-and a Goliath waiting to be felled by the stone of unindoctrinated inquiry. Were students to take that stone in hand, were teachers to champion their charges' right to cognitive independence, "honor student" would cease to be an institutional stamp of approval on those who best conform to scaled cookie-cutter standards. It would become instead a personal badge, privately earned and owned for life by students who choose to think for themselves.