Quotations from John Taylor Gatto. Dumbing Us Down

Introduction

John Taylor Gatto (1935 -) is a a retired American school teacher and author of several books on education. Named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, he is markedly critical of compulsory schooling.

When he announced his retirement, he wrote that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living." Then he began a public speaking and writing career. He has received several awards, and promotes homeschooling among other things, holding that public schooling has very severe, nasty influences on children and young ones. Making children inherently confused is one of them. [Wikipedia, s.v. "John Taylor Gatto"]

Dumbing Us Down

Does the mad and often brutally competitive scramble for resources – for more pay for teachers, for more equipment, for more money for schools – teach our children about us? [Fragment from David H. Albert's Publisher's Note]

Biographical Note

From my grandfather and his independent German ways I learned a great deal. [p. x-xi]

Living in Manhattan has been for me in many ways like living on the moon . . . During that time, I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality. [p. xi]

I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing . . . Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy . . . but slowly I began to realize that the [school] bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior. [p. xii]

I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself. [p. xii]

I get out of kids' way, I give them space and time and respect. [p. xiv]

The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher

Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. [p. 10-11]

The society that has come increasingly under central control . . . shows itself in the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast, all of which are the products of this control. [p. 14]

School . . . in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. [p. 14]

The seven lessons of school-teaching – confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance – all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses. [p. 17-18 ]

It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. [p. 19]

Self-education . . . didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see. [p. 20]

The Psychopathic School

Our nation ranks at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. [31 January 1990] [p. 23]

The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory. They are uneasy with intimacy. They are materialistic, dependent, passive. [A selection] [31-32]

More money and more people pumped into this sick institution will only make it sicker. [p. 33]

At the core of . . . [very old] elite . . . education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. [p. 34]

We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance. [p. 34]

A restructured school system . . . needs to stop being a parasite. [p. 36]

We Need Less School, Not More

The "caring" in networks is in some important way feigned. [p. 55]

Networks like schools are not communities . . . No one survives these places with their humanity intact. [p. 56]

A vampire network like a school, which tears off huge chunks of time and energy needed for building community and family – and always asks for more – needs to have a stake driven through its heart and be nailed into its coffin . . . I say we need less school, not more. [p. 57]

Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other . . . Networks make people lonely. [p. 58]

Networks do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is they cannot. [p. 58]

[In] the world of mass-schooling, large cities have great difficulty supporting healthy community life. [Cf p. 62]

Over ninety percent of the United States' population now lives inside fifty urban aggregations. [p. 63]

Institutions . . . exist after management has been completely replaced. They are ideas come to life . . . The deepest purposes of these gigantic networks is to regulate and to make uniform . . . they cause much damage. [p. 64]

This philistine potential – that teaching the young for pay would inevitably expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students . . . made Socrates condemn the Sophists so strongly long ago in ancient Greece. [p. 65]

Grades and "classes" . . . a homelife and community exist . . . as antidote to the poison. [p. 66]

Good education = good job, good money, good things . . . This prescription makes both parent and student easier to regulate and intimidate. [p. 66]

Why . . . are we locking these kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? [p. 67]

A pseudo community is just a different kind of network – its . . . most commonly shared dream is to get out to a better place. [p. 69]

Whistle-blowing against institutional malpractice is . . . a good way to get canned or relentlessly persecuted. [p. 71]

We should begin thinking about school reform by stopping these places from functioning like cysts . . . that take our money, our children, and our time and give nothing back. Do we really want more of it? [p. 73]

Schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities. [p. 74]

A Massachusetts Senator [Ted Kennedy] said a while ago that his state had a higher literacy rate before it adopted compulsory schooling than after. [p. 74]

Mass-education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation. [p. 77]

Working for official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination; these have no connection with education – they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not freedom. [p. 77]

According to [Bertrand] Russell, mass-schooling produced a recognizably American student: anti-intellectual, superstitious, lacking self-confidence, and with less of what Russell called "inner freedom" than his or her counterpart in any other nation he knew of, past or present. These schooled children became . . . inadequate. [p. 78]

"Good fences make good neighbors," said Robert Frost. The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to learn to live apart as individuals and as families. [p. 79]

Young people . . . don't have anything to work for now except money. [p. 79]