If I could have educators read one book to learn from, this would be it. Peter Hoeg's brutal tale of inclusion gone horrifically wrong in 1960s Denmark challenges, through the purest of childhood voices, everything you think you know about school.

This is the book which taught me that "the first technology of school is time." The book which explains why integration of every kind has so often failed in US schools. The book which destroys every argument for standardized testing and every argument for linear grading systems. And it does all this while making few explicit arguments about any of this - though the author is crystal clear on the nonsense and cruelty of our assessments.

Whether Hoeg's book is fully autobiographical or not, of course, matters not at all. Rather what matters is his incredible capture of the voices of three of the most challenging yet inspiring children you will meet in literature, and that's before we meet and understand the fourth child, Oskar Humlun, who represents all that we want our children to be, and all of the ways we fail our children.

Borderliners - original brutal Danish title "For Those Who Might be Useful" - is a difficult challenging painful read. But if you work in schools you owe it to your students to truly understand this book.