Parents tend to think that schools exist to help their children
reach their highest intellectual ability. However, that is not
the political goal of the industrialists that fund compulsory
education, which is to create a nation of complacent, socialized
workers, deep in debt because they have bought too much of what
the industries produce.
I have heard John Taylor Gatto speak three times now, and
each time I get something a little different out of what he has
to say. He came out with a book about the history of American
education that is shaking up a lot of people who think that Carnegie,
Ford and other industialists who have donated so generously to
education were doing so out of the kindness of their hearts.
In the essays below, Gatto speaks about what he knows best
and what he's found out. He was New York City and State Teacher
of the Year at various times in his career. He taught at a school
were teens everyone else had given up on were sent, and he did
a good job with them but in a creative and unorthodox way.
He let them out of school, to be around town, working on various
projects, learning first hand how to work the system.
You will not enjoy the essays in the links below. They will
make you feel sad and angry. They will make you think.
Bootie Zimmer's Choice
Our children have been held captive by a method of literacy transmission
that ignores reality -- and makes a very large fortune each year
doing so. By John Taylor Gatto.
The Curriculum of Necessity
Or "What must and educated person know?" By John Taylor
Gatto. Includes Harvard's list of what a well-educated person
should be able to do.
Great Thinkers on Self-Education: John Taylor Gatto
After being recognized as the New York City Teacher of the Year in 1990, John Taylor Gatto stood before the crowd and outlined the problems he saw with the current educational system.
I may be a teacher, but I'm not an educator
John Taylor Gatto's resignation letter in the Wall Street Journal.
"I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach:
A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice,
vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to
quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world
I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore."
'I'm a Saboteur.'
Brainpower is more important than ever, but education seems more
backward than ever. John Taylor Gatto, an award-winning teacher,
now aims to overthrow the public-school establishment for which
he worked for 30 years. By Daniel H. Pink, Fast Company, November
2000.
I Quit, I Think
I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust and frustration which grew too heavy to be borne finally did me in.
John Taylor Gatto
The site to find out more about John and to purchase a pre-publication
of his book, Underground
History of American Education. You can also view a pictorial
essay about the history of education.
John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto was the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year when he ended his 30-year teaching career with a flourish, with an essay he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, titled "I Quit, I Think."
Nine Assumptions of Modern Schooling
John Taylor Gatto warned that although there were many caring
teachers who worked hard in the system, the institution itself
was "psychopathic and without conscience," and would
always overwhelm their individual contributions.
Personal Solutions, Family Solutions
"If you have no time for your family you want to ask yourself,
'Why must I always be do-ing something?' God made us human be-ings,
not do-ings!" By John Taylor Gatto.
Public School Nightmare
Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought? By John Taylor Gatto
Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991. If you pay for these lessons, you should at least know what they are.
Re-Establishing Altruism As A Viable Social Norm
Audio and text versions of John Gatto's speeches and talks.
Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher
A longer version: "The first lesson I teach is confusion.
Everything I teach is out of context... I teach the unrelating
of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much."
By John Taylor Gatto, New Society Publishers, 1992
Teach Your Own Children . . . At Home
This article was originally printed in the July/August 1980 edition
of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS, pp. 11-16, as their "Plowboy Interview."
The Underground History of American Education
A Schoolteachers Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of
Modern Schooling by John Taylor Gatto. A review on Family
Unschoolers Network.
We The People Radio Interview By Jerry Brown March 25, 1997
Jerry Brown: Welcome to another edition of We The People, this
hour we're going to talk some more about learning, education,
and schooling in its many variations.
What Really Matters - Part 1 -
By John Taylor Gatto. If what I've said is even partly true,
you'll have to join me in sabotaging the global economy and sabotaging
the government schools, because schools and government and machinery-makers
lie to you about what matters every time.
What Really Matters - Part 2 -
By John Taylor Gatto. Warehousing the young; warehousing the
aged good business, I know, but good for what?
Why Schools Don't Educate
We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom.
My husband, Fred Zeise, and son, Scott, help Gatto and Diane
Keith, editor of Homefires,
the Journal of Homeschooling, get the video system set
up.
Gatto revealing what Carnegie's motivation was to "help"
educate America's school children, to make them complacent workers.
