Peter H. Hennessy is a retired educator – teacher of high school history and, latterly, professor of education at Queen's University in Kingston. While principal of the Port Arthur Collegiate (Thunder Bay) in the 1960s, he developed the fixed idea that schools are comparable with prisons, mental institutions, and homes for the aged. They are all designed, he believes, to shape humans into semi-dependent beings for the convenience of society. That is the animating philosophy of his book.