The excerpts below are from a speech by John Taylor Gatto after he accepted the New York City Teacher of the Year award. We present his provocative views as the school year begins.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor....
I don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
It's high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.
At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge, everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of 10. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.
One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Laura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder then that in manhood when he decided to make a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, that it was an international award-winner - even though his regular work was as a carpenter?
Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back, we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.
A short time ago I took $70 and sent a 12-year-old girl from my class with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of SeaBright to lunch and apologize for polluting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small town police procedures. A few days later two more of my 12-year-old kids traveled alone to West 31st Street from Harlem where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor, next week three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 a.m. in the morning studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatched 18-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Are these "special" children in a "special" program? Well, in one sense yes, but nobody knows about this program but myself and the kids. They're just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them can't add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far it is from New York to California.
Does that worry me? Of course, but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value.
We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstraction. This is an emergency, it requires drastic action to correct - our children are dying like flies in schooling, good schooling or bad schooling, it's all the same. Irrelevant.
Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of "school" open - to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn't succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6,000 in 1976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can too.
Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.
The Curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we've gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.
I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large, vested interests pre-empting all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary.
We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We've all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press - a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more "expert" opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough.
Time for a return to Democracy, Individuality, and Family.
By Jonathan Rowe Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
July 9, 1990
It's 6:00 a.m. on a Thursday near the end of the school year, and John Taylor Gatto is pacing the sidewalk at 107th and Amsterdam. Corrugated metal gates still cover the bodega storefronts, and Mr. Gatto looks a little like a painter, in his white shirt, trousers, and high-top sneakers. But he's a teacher and a worried one. Alex was on time; Freddy and Victor haven't shown up. They go rouse Freddy out of bed, at his housing project in Harlem. (Victor was a question mark anyway.) Finally, they are driving through the Lincoln Tunnel to Secaucus, N.J., where the eighth graders from the Booker T. Washington Junior High School in Manhattan will spend the day at a trucking company. The day's lessons now begin.
John Taylor Gatto's Guide to Mis-Educating the Nation's Youths
July 9, 1990
Remove them from the business of the world until the time has passed to learn self-teaching.
Age-grade them so the past and future are made mute and irrelevant.
Take all religion out of their lives.
Remove all significant functions from their families and homes except that of ``dormitory.''
Keep them under surveillance every minute from dawn to dusk. Give them no privacy. Record their behavior quantitatively.
Addict them to mechanical displays (television, etc.) as recreation and as learning.
In all free moments after schooling, tempt them with games and commercial entertainments that teach predetermined habits of response.
Pair the selling of merchandise with females in their prime child-bearing years so that the valences of love-making and mothering can be transferred intact to the goods vended.
Remove private ritual from their lives, particularly rituals of family dining and food preparation.
Keep both parents employed with strangers' business, or break families apart to prevent promiscuous intimacy with children.
By Amanda Paulson Special to The Christian Science Monitor
October 10, 2000
John Taylor Gatto had just been named New York State Teacher of the Year nine years ago when he made a shocking announcement. After teaching 26 years in New York City public schools, he was quitting, saying he could no longer continue to "hurt kids."
Since then, Mr. Gatto has written and lectured extensively on the negative effects of compulsory schooling. His newest book, "The Underground History of Education" (Oxford Village Press), will be published in January. Sections of the book are available online at www.johntaylorgatto.com.
The following are excerpts from a recent Monitor interview:
On why he wrote the book:
I had a need after 30 years of fairly successful teaching, with all kinds of kids, to understand why the business had evolved the way it had. The first thing I learned was that the school world is not independent, but a subordinate industry to government and industry and commerce.
On education before school became compulsory:
My own reading from the first 120 years of American national history is exactly the same as Alexis de Tocqueville's reading. He says flatly this is the best-educated nation in the Western world, bar none.... It's just dazzling what people can do for themselves when the boot of the government is off their back.
Everybody understood what the homeschoolers understand today - [compulsory school is] nonsense. It becomes a destructive activity to lock people up and drill them and confine them with low-level abstractions.
On testing:
There's no teacher worth his or her salt who, inside of a period at the start of the year, doesn't know who's going to get the As, who's going to get the Bs, who's going to cause trouble.... How do you know when you get a good haircut? You look in the mirror.
What we've allowed to happen is for normal good judgment and wisdom to be set aside for some kind of mathematical wizardry.
There's nothing a standardized test measures other than your ability to score well on the next standardized test.
Some assumptions he says are made in modern schooling:
Government school is a central force for social cohesion ... and a bureaucratized public order is our only defense against chaos and anarchy.
The certifiable expertise of schoolteachers is superior to that of lay people.
Compelling children to assemble in mandated groups, for mandated intervals, with mandated texts ... does not interfere with academic learning.
Children will inevitably grow apart from parents in beliefs as they grow older, and this process must be encouraged.
On the role of the teacher:
The balance of responsibility was [once] divided much differently. The assumption was that the kid would do 90 percent of the work and the teacher 10 percent. Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, that assumption was deliberately reversed. Each time you intervene in a kid's learning past an allowable minimum, you're actually impeding the process.
On curriculum:
There's no scientific evidence justifying any particular subject selection, any sequence of subjects, any internal arrangements of time. There is no body of knowledge inaccessible to a motivated elementary school student. The rationing of learning by age - and usually it's by social class and age - is indefensible.
Delinquent behavior is a reaction to the structure of schooling. It's not some innate characteristic of large groups of children. School makes children angry because it's a consistently dishonest place and a visibly unfair place.
On the future of schools:
I see great hope for educational advancement or spiritual advancement. I've traveled 1.4 million miles in 50 states and seven foreign countries, and while I've seen a lot less hope overseas, [here] I see effective reform and resistance everywhere.
The most effective of all, bar none, is the homeschool revolution. Approximately 2 million people from all social classes and all religious and cultural backgrounds have, in effect, set up private labs of education.
What makes a good school?
That the school part is de-emphasized. Furthermore you have to believe that everybody wants the best. Everybody wants to learn. They'd like to have worthwhile meaningful work to do.
On what kids are capable of:
I taught 13-year-olds from [the inner city] using the same text and methodology that was used on me at Cornell and Columbia. I pushed them harder than I was pushed. I never accepted second-rate work without taking the kid aside and showing him why it was second-rate.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society
1st https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0910/uteach.html
Self-Knowledge, True Education
By John Taylor Gatto
September 10, 1990
The excerpts below are from a speech by John Taylor Gatto after he accepted the New York City Teacher of the Year award. We present his provocative views as the school year begins.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor....
I don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
It's high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.
At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge, everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of 10. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.
One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Laura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder then that in manhood when he decided to make a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, that it was an international award-winner - even though his regular work was as a carpenter?
Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back, we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.
A short time ago I took $70 and sent a 12-year-old girl from my class with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of SeaBright to lunch and apologize for polluting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small town police procedures. A few days later two more of my 12-year-old kids traveled alone to West 31st Street from Harlem where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor, next week three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 a.m. in the morning studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatched 18-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Are these "special" children in a "special" program? Well, in one sense yes, but nobody knows about this program but myself and the kids. They're just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them can't add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far it is from New York to California.
Does that worry me? Of course, but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value.
We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstraction. This is an emergency, it requires drastic action to correct - our children are dying like flies in schooling, good schooling or bad schooling, it's all the same. Irrelevant.
Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of "school" open - to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn't succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6,000 in 1976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can too.
Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.
The Curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we've gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.
I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large, vested interests pre-empting all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary.
We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We've all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press - a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more "expert" opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough.
Time for a return to Democracy, Individuality, and Family.
I've said my piece. Thank you.
2nd https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0709/dgatto.html
Learning as an Endless Odyssey
By Jonathan Rowe Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
July 9, 1990
It's 6:00 a.m. on a Thursday near the end of the school year, and John Taylor Gatto is pacing the sidewalk at 107th and Amsterdam. Corrugated metal gates still cover the bodega storefronts, and Mr. Gatto looks a little like a painter, in his white shirt, trousers, and high-top sneakers. But he's a teacher and a worried one. Alex was on time; Freddy and Victor haven't shown up. They go rouse Freddy out of bed, at his housing project in Harlem. (Victor was a question mark anyway.) Finally, they are driving through the Lincoln Tunnel to Secaucus, N.J., where the eighth graders from the Booker T. Washington Junior High School in Manhattan will spend the day at a trucking company. The day's lessons now begin.
[ more ]
3rd https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0709/d1gatto.html
John Taylor Gatto's Guide to Mis-Educating the Nation's Youths
July 9, 1990
4th https://www.csmonitor.com/2000/1010/p21s2.html
A maverick takes on public schooling
Interview with John Taylor Gatto
By Amanda Paulson Special to The Christian Science Monitor
October 10, 2000
John Taylor Gatto had just been named New York State Teacher of the Year nine years ago when he made a shocking announcement. After teaching 26 years in New York City public schools, he was quitting, saying he could no longer continue to "hurt kids."
Since then, Mr. Gatto has written and lectured extensively on the negative effects of compulsory schooling. His newest book, "The Underground History of Education" (Oxford Village Press), will be published in January. Sections of the book are available online at www.johntaylorgatto.com.
The following are excerpts from a recent Monitor interview:
On why he wrote the book:
I had a need after 30 years of fairly successful teaching, with all kinds of kids, to understand why the business had evolved the way it had. The first thing I learned was that the school world is not independent, but a subordinate industry to government and industry and commerce.
On education before school became compulsory:
My own reading from the first 120 years of American national history is exactly the same as Alexis de Tocqueville's reading. He says flatly this is the best-educated nation in the Western world, bar none.... It's just dazzling what people can do for themselves when the boot of the government is off their back.
Everybody understood what the homeschoolers understand today - [compulsory school is] nonsense. It becomes a destructive activity to lock people up and drill them and confine them with low-level abstractions.
On testing:
There's no teacher worth his or her salt who, inside of a period at the start of the year, doesn't know who's going to get the As, who's going to get the Bs, who's going to cause trouble.... How do you know when you get a good haircut? You look in the mirror.
What we've allowed to happen is for normal good judgment and wisdom to be set aside for some kind of mathematical wizardry.
There's nothing a standardized test measures other than your ability to score well on the next standardized test.
Some assumptions he says are made in modern schooling:
Government school is a central force for social cohesion ... and a bureaucratized public order is our only defense against chaos and anarchy.
The certifiable expertise of schoolteachers is superior to that of lay people.
Compelling children to assemble in mandated groups, for mandated intervals, with mandated texts ... does not interfere with academic learning.
Children will inevitably grow apart from parents in beliefs as they grow older, and this process must be encouraged.
On the role of the teacher:
The balance of responsibility was [once] divided much differently. The assumption was that the kid would do 90 percent of the work and the teacher 10 percent. Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, that assumption was deliberately reversed. Each time you intervene in a kid's learning past an allowable minimum, you're actually impeding the process.
On curriculum:
There's no scientific evidence justifying any particular subject selection, any sequence of subjects, any internal arrangements of time. There is no body of knowledge inaccessible to a motivated elementary school student. The rationing of learning by age - and usually it's by social class and age - is indefensible.
Delinquent behavior is a reaction to the structure of schooling. It's not some innate characteristic of large groups of children. School makes children angry because it's a consistently dishonest place and a visibly unfair place.
On the future of schools:
I see great hope for educational advancement or spiritual advancement. I've traveled 1.4 million miles in 50 states and seven foreign countries, and while I've seen a lot less hope overseas, [here] I see effective reform and resistance everywhere.
The most effective of all, bar none, is the homeschool revolution. Approximately 2 million people from all social classes and all religious and cultural backgrounds have, in effect, set up private labs of education.
What makes a good school?
That the school part is de-emphasized. Furthermore you have to believe that everybody wants the best. Everybody wants to learn. They'd like to have worthwhile meaningful work to do.
On what kids are capable of:
I taught 13-year-olds from [the inner city] using the same text and methodology that was used on me at Cornell and Columbia. I pushed them harder than I was pushed. I never accepted second-rate work without taking the kid aside and showing him why it was second-rate.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society