He is also an extraordinary teacher, once being named as Teacher of the Year for New York State. One of the most important pedagogues in the development of the Prussian system, Heinrich Pestalozzi, touted his approach as one that would mold the poor to accept all the exertions and efforts peculiar to their class. As Gatto put it, Pestalozzi offered them love in place of ambition. John Taylor Gatto was a celebrated teacher and outspoken critic of the school system, having spent a decade researching its origins and early history in USA. If allowed to continue without confrontation, it could end in the extinction of that spark of genius that I believe is in everyone. In his article "Against School", John Taylor Gatto criticizes America's system of schooling children, arguing that the whole system is bad and unfixable. Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Gatto was born in the Pittsburgh area steel town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. In addition to building its factory system on the backs of slave labor in the Americas and the looting of resources in its Asian colonies, the British Empire used its vast dominion abroad to refine its psychological management of the young at home. view less Much of Gattos writing is focused on the basic yet often overlooked distinction between schooling and education. It was headlined, I Quit, I Think. Heres an excerpt: Ive 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. He is survived by his loving wife and two children. stroke. Again, this may all sound harshmaybe almost unbelievable to children of the elites who have benefited from this system of social engineering. 09/10/2011. American education system. " School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. Contents 1 Background 2 Resignation 3 Exposures 4 Later activities 5 Publications Above all, Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents to share with the rest of the world. He says networks have become an unhealthy substitute for community in the United States. Just as racism crafted for itself a scientific justification, so did forced schooling make its case in scientific terms. Novelist, John Taylor Gatto, in his speech essay, "Why Schools Don't Education", conveys schools aren't as educational as they should be. John Taylor Gatto's "Against School" paints a very morbid picture of the American school system. Slayback also said he carries a card in his wallet with this John Taylor Gatto quote: You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life or you become an unwitting actor in somebody else's script. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the "free" time of children. According to Gatto, the purpose of public education can be boiled down the six functions described by Alexander Inglis in his 1918 book Principles of Secondary Education:[23][24], After learning he was regularly confused with another teacher named John Gatto, he added Taylor to his pen name. DAISY . He was awarded New York Citys Teacher of the Year three years in a row in 1989, 1990, and 1991. 62 Copy quote. Get daily news, in-depth reporting and critical analysis from the journalists, activists and thinkers who are working to improve our world.. Florida's Miccosukee is the first tribe allowed to run its own school, where students fully participate in family and cultural activities. In the majority of the essay Gatto relies on personal anecdotes, historical examples that do not correspond with modern day society, and bold unsubstantiated claims. In 1963, he was hired as a fulltime 8th grade English teacher at Intermediate School 44 on New York City's Upper West Side. John Taylor Gatto is worthy of a heros eulogy for his work as a true champion of children, as an insightful author on education, and as an award-winning New York public school teacher. Books are "dangerous to those in power. that's why we publish them," Haymarket Books said in a press release. John Taylor Gatto The Underground History Of American Education Book by santa barbarian. A much-sought after speaker on education throughout the United States, his other books include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education . By the 1830s, schools based on the Prussian and Lancaster models stretched from New York to Texas, with significant admirers such as Calvin Ellis Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowes husband, who advocated for the adoption of a Prussian-style national education system in the United States. "I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childness." (para 4). Gatto was born to Andrew Michael Mario and Frances Virginia (ne Zimmer) Gatto in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Pittsburgh. Gatto envisioned an education system that placed freedom and justice above technology and efficiency. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. TheBreakaway Zy Marquiez May 5, 2017. John Gatto lived in New York State. Twentieth-century scientific schooling is best described as the social experiment of inculcating into children what Gatto calls the seven lessons of school teaching. These lessons of mass forced schooling merit lengthy quotation: It confuses the students. Even reformers can't imagine school much different." John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling Gatto envisioned an education system that placed freedom and justice above technology and efficiency. ". In this way, children can be molded to comply with the status quo and know their place in the caste system devised for them. The Title IV-E program uses social work students economic precarity to nudge them into the family policing workforce. Though he is no longer with us today, we would be remiss to neglect his insights a year after his death. One need to look no further than Friedrich Engelss 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, to understand the impact of the industrial revolution on Englands poor, whose living conditions dropped precipitously at the same time as mass schooling was being introduced in the country. If you found the piece above useful, informative, or inspiring, please consider supporting Truthout with a tax-deductible donation. This faculty was charged with dribbling out something called curriculum to inmates, a gruel so thin [that this school] might rather have been a home for the feeble-minded than a place of education. Gatto, The Underground History of American Education. (To understand how idiotic such a program is, consider a piano teacher who never instructs beginners in how to read notes on the scale. John Taylor Gatto is an American retired school teacher of 29 years 8 months and author of several books on education. Gatto was born in 1935 in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, so he could recall getting a real education before the cancer of compulsory factory schooling metastasized. However, the English ruling class could not indefinitely exploit its workers on the basis of material coercion and physical force alone. How John Taylor Gatto Helped Us Regain Our Freedom To Think Trending 1 Questioning Biden's Ukraine Policy Doesn't Make You An 'Isolationist' 2 With 3D Body-Image Avatars And Fake Voices For. Watch here as Gatto rhetorically asks: What could be more crazy than agreeing to give your child over to total strangers for 12 years while they tinker with his mind?. He recognized that their worth was not determined by the neighborhoods where they lived, their parents annual salaries, or the scores they received on standardized tests. medical condition. John Taylor Gattoo, Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling 70 likes Like "What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up." John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling For those of us who put our kids in public schools, this rings very harsh. She is author of ". I dont believe anybody else in our time has fought as hard to restore the right of children to learn and to think independently. The teacher did not in fact teach, but, rather, served as a bystander and inspector who would form a hierarchy among the students and then let the so-called brighter ones teach the rest. John Taylor Gatto (December 15, 1935 [3] - October 25, 2018 [4]) was an American author and school teacher. He died on October 25, 2018 in New York City, New York, USA. Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system. The mind simply fires away at the connections, when allowed and encouraged to do so. He has completed degrees from Grinnell College and Kings College London and currently resides in Lucknow, India. Gatto's description of the school system sounds more like the description of a prison or a sweat shop than a school. Ive 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. His book Dumbing Us Down explained why. It was the stratification of the new industrial system applied to the young. It is this connection between schooling and white supremacy which Gatto understood. Were proud to publish real news 365 days of the year, completely free of charge to our readers. Rather than sending his letter of resignation to his superiors in his school district, he sent a copy of . The net effect of holding children in confinement for twelve years without honor paid to the spirit is a compelling demonstration that the State considers the Western spiritual tradition dangerous, subversive. Submitted by wojtek on January 26, 2012 John Taylor Gatto (2000). While Gatto gained a readership among certain sections of the homeschooling and alternative education movements, his piercing criticism of U.S. schooling and its link to the crisis of Western civilization deserves a much wider audience. John Taylor Gatto is a well known critic of schooling. A seventh-grade teacher, Gatto has been named New York City Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year. I teach school and win awards doing it. I cant train children to wait to be told what to do; I cant train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I cant persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isnt any, and I cant persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. No one can doubt the brilliance and effectiveness of Gatto when he taught public school in New York City. He inspired teachers to reassess their reasons for becoming educators and to challenge the status quo. The students want to learn freely instead of being forced to learn. John Taylor Gatto was a New York public school teacher with 30 years of classroom experience. John Taylor Gatto is an American retired school teacher of 30 years and author of several books on education. Views. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions. Hi John. It got the British disastrously routed, and Braddock killed. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. What follows is a transcription of the key section from John's classic speech and opus, The Underground History of American Education. He was declared New York states Teacher of the Year in 1991 as well. If you think about it, you too will realize that powerful elites in our institutions are always trying to suppress human ingenuity and imagination. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly. From that day in 1991 until his death one year ago, Gatto wrote and spoke about his experiences in U.S. public schools in an effort not just to critique a system which he saw as beyond reform, but also to envision what education could look like in a truly free and just society. John Taylor Gatto was born on December 15, 1935 in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, USA. They didnt want to be talked down to but longed to be treated with respect and dignity. She is a co-host of The Way The World Works, a Tuttle Twins podcast for families. We will organize children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. The backdrop of my teaching debut was a predicament without any possible solution, a deadly brew compounded from twelve hundred black teenagers penned inside a gloomy brick pile for six hours a day, with a white guard staff misnamed faculty manning the light towers and machine-gun posts. Gatto believes that schooling is not necessary, and there are many successful people that were self-educated. In fact, its been a sinister, generational war against the human mind. Gattos devotion to family is reflected in his half-century marriage to his wife, Janet. [11], Gatto promoted homeschooling, and specifically unschooling and open source learning. Its a vision that was once universally accepted in America: that children learn when their natural curiosity is allowed to flourish in the joy of learning; that we should respect the mind of the child and encourage his ability to think independently; and that we should especially support loving bonds between children and their families, between children and their communities. People are only little plastic lumps of human dough. In other words, the student not only can, but should, be kneaded into the proper shape, and there is no better institution to complete this task than the school. For Gatto, Monongahela symbolized America at its finest. Navigation. His words will continue to have a lasting impact on education for years to come. This is Part 2 in my series about different theories of power. A weekend seminar with John Taylor Gatto John Taylor Gatto, one of the outstanding scholars and writers in the history of American education, is not only a truth-teller about the corrupting and dangerous American compulsory school system. At the heart of his work is the simple yet radical suggestion that mass schooling, a 19th-century European import to the U.S., is not the modern manifestation of the ancient concept of education but, rather, its diametric opposite. [9] In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He has been a fierce advocate for self-directed "guerrilla" education for decades, and is also the author of Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education. But here are several other excerpts that Gatto offers us to think about: In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberly of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state as it had been done a century before in Prussia. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. I just cant do it anymore. When faculty members would come to him seeking advice, his prescription was simple: treat your students the same way you treat anyone else. download 1 file . The US adopted its . After child labor laws were introduced in the 19th century and extended in the 20th, the state had to find something to do with these unoccupied working-class children. In his own words: "School . John Taylor Gatto (1935 - 2018) 0 references . Bell admired what he saw as a rigid social hierarchy in Hindu village schools characterized by intellectual and religious instruction for a tiny minority at the top and caste-appropriate technical training for everyone else. I cant train children to wait to be told what to do; I cant train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I cant persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isnt any, and I cant persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. Please do not edit the piece, ensure that you attribute the author and mention that this article was originally published on FEE.org. Gatto first explains that he taught for 30 years at the best and worst schools in Manhattan. Call me Mr. Gatto, please. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of school to include family as the main engine of education. He claims that schools are not places for children to learn, develop, and flourish. Among them are The Underground History of American Education, Dumbing Us Down, and Weapons of Mass Instruction. He was relentless in pursuing his mission to expose the machinery of schooling. It was written by John Taylor Gatto. Its same material year after year, same classroom year after year. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem). This radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Against School is an essay he wrote expressing his hate for it. obvious and dull, repeated too often (found in the 6th paragraph) Paean. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. ESSAY. With Blooms Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, (1949-1953) school is a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of instruction. Using methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn proper thoughts, feelings, and actions, and have their improper attitudes brought from home remediated. Today, such a utopian agenda goes by the name Social and Emotional Learning, and it is being pushed hard into all of the schools under the banner of Common Core. In his magnum opus, The Underground History of American Education, Gatto traces the material roots of mass schooling back to the economic and ideological demands of a burgeoning industrial capitalism in Europe. When that happens, John Taylor Gatto will have had a big hand in it. Main page; Community portal; Project chat; Create a new Item; Analyzes gatto's aversion to the prussian educational system, which is designed to propel some forward, while leaving others behind. So as we honor the life of this great man, I leave you with a few of Gatto's most inspirational quotes. Educational Policy Analysis . What a beautiful legacy: to reclaim for our children their birthright of free thought. John was a brilliant and well-researched man. . He is an activist critical of compulso. Vincent Kelley is a writer, researcher and musician based in the U.S. and India. destination in the social machine, not one step beyond. He claims to have firsthand experience of the boredom that students and teachers struggle with. . Gatto took on a struggle that should not be daunting, because his vision was so simple and true. Gatto encouraged parents to foster an environment where their children could follow their bliss rather than being stuck in a classroom, trained to be just another cog in the machine. Gatto points out the irony that it was the churches, particularly those of the Anglican and Quaker variety, which laid the foundation for their own decline by encouraging the expansion of mass forced schooling. The task we set before ourselves is very simple. I should know., It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. What impulse triggers the pornographic urge to deprive kids of volition, to fiddle with their lives?. Gatto was born in 1935 in the working-class Western Pennsylvania town of Monongahela. His extensive dedication to her in Underground History ends with the words: until death do us part. They raised two children. He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow. In 2011, he co-created "The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto," which is an epic 5 hour video interview exploring the history of education, political power, and freedom that was released in 2012. It has sold over 200,000 copies [1] and consists of a multitude of speeches given by the author. John Taylor Gatto. The problem of the book, unfortunately, is author John Taylor Gatto himself, just as it was in his other work, "Dumbing Us Down." As long as Gatto explains the actions and views of others, he is on the money. He'll be missed dearly. From: John Taylor Gatto. Now It May Put Them Back. In the film, he tells the fascinating history of schooling from ancient times and how modern education became stuck in the reductionist and mechanistic worldview of the European Enlightenment. a formal expression of praise (found in the 11th paragraph) Docile. A 2003 article by John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher, on the US education system, its history and reasons for being. The State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School. The obvious answer is so that persons life can be socially engineered, and childrens independent maturity can be retarded, or even stopped. , where it was published as an op-ed on July 25, 1991. Rather, he . The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. Author and ardent unschooling advocate Kerry McDonald had this to say of Gatto's legacy in this regard: John Taylor Gattos writings inspired a generation of parents and educators to question deep-seated beliefs about compulsory mass schooling and pursue alternatives. Pedagogues in Massachusetts, led by Horace Mann, saw opportunity in that crisis, and spoke about how the state could assert itself into a parental role. On July 25, 1991, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Poetic Justice Warrior John Taylor Gatto.