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 about education. 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.

Here is a John Taylor Gatto website primarily focused on his book: Underground History of American Education. The site has some videos and sound clips of John speaking.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Photos taken and copyrighted by Ann Zeise and used with permission of John Taylor Gatto.

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You will be extremely happy to know that you have nothing in common with me. You glide along through life like a leaf down a crystal stream. You tend to steer in the direction everyone else is steering, and the road ahead of you is well lit and mapped out. Your children have been welcomed with open arms by everyone they’ve met, and your home is a bastion of peace, harmony, and good will. Best of all, your homeschooling experience has been the most rewarding and inspiring era of your life, and you’ve never doubted your calling for even a moment. See? I told you that you have nothing in common with me.

Me . . . well, my life has been slightly different. My leaf tends to get stuck against every wet rock of the stream, my steering has been out of alignment for as long as I can remember, and the road I am on has been steep, winding, and many times even closed for construction. My children, both with special needs, have been stared at, frowned upon, and pitied in their turn, and my home can feel much more like an open battlefield than a fortress at times. And frankly, I’ve been tempted to quit homeschooling more times than I’ve been tempted to cheat on my diet, and that is saying a lot. However, while my life in no way resembles yours, you needn’t feel sorry for me one bit. I like my life . . . actually, I love it – – every little bit of it – – because God made me especially for it.

So many things in life seem designed with the “average” person in mind, don’t they? Airplane passenger seats are designed for an average size person, standardized tests are designed for the average student, and medicine doses are prescribed with the average person in mind. I’ll never forget the feeling of empathy I felt when I saw someone being asked to move along because they wouldn’t fit into a ride at a theme park. Or the first time I saw children on a park playground laughing at my son because he couldn’t control the jerking tics caused by his Tourette Syndrome. Our society caters to the average person . . . the average family . . . the average way of life. Unfortunately, I just can’t squeeze myself into that mold.

Homeschoolers used to be marginalized too, but over the years, they have become more accepted and respected. Within the homeschooling community, there are now groupings that help people fit in. There are Christian homeschoolers, unschoolers, Classical schoolers, Waldorf schoolers, Montessori schoolers, and traditional schoolers. Would you believe that I don’t fit into any of those either? We are Christians, but aren’t really homeschooling for religious reasons, we read the classics, but our exposure to Latin consists of what is written on the backs of our coins, and my worn-out lesson plan bookwould attest that I am a far cry from adopting unschooling in the near future. I suppose I simply don’t assimilate well.

Strangely enough, though, my life is far from impossible. Someone had the good sense to design a few things with the irregular person in mind. TiVo invented a way to automatically record any show that happens to concern Jane Austen – – my current obsession. Tombstone miraculously created a frozen pizza that is half cheese and half supreme – – the only way my family will eat it. I recently saw a magazine in the library for people who garden on their deck. I truly thought I was the only one guiding squash vines around the railing posts. And thank heavens for Time4Learning.com, a multimedia homeschool curriculum that is so well suited for the out-of-the-box learner.

I have learned over time that the kingdom of God is certainly an upside-down kingdom, and that swimming against the current is actually inevitable. Praying for my enemies, returning kindness for evil, and forgiving those who are beyond forgiveness are part of the inverted life I’ve been asked to lead. So, I shouldn’t be all that surprised that my leaf takes a few hits as it heads downstream. The image I see in my mirror each day looks different from any other image I see in the world around me because God has asked me to model a life that is far from average. In fact, I think God delights in the fact that I am abnormal . . . unusual . . . exceptional.

Because of this, I know that when I hit the roadblocks of life, I can find a way around them. When my children face the challenges of being different, I can remind them that means they are on the right track! When the normal battles of life take over my home, I understand that I will win the war in the end. And when I have laid my head down on my pillow at the end of a difficult day, and wondered why God has called me to this thing called “homeschooling” – – I will remember that it is because I have been called according to His purpose. Called to be different.

Kerry Jones is a freelance writer and web maintenance engineer in North Carolina. She has two sons, and has been homeschooling since 1999.

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