NL-Outsidethebox [confederation]

Dumbing Us Down: An Interview With John Taylor Gatto

By Terry Everton

If anyone is qualified to intelligently analyze the institution of modern schooling, it’s John Taylor Gatto. While teaching in the public schools of Manhattan for 30 years, Gatto was named New York State teacher of the year as well as New York City teacher of the year three times. Then, at the height of his teaching career in 1991, he published an essay in the Wall Street Journal titled I Quit, I Think… and promptly quit.

Since then, Gatto has traveled the world lecturing and writing about the perils of his former profession. His first book, Dumbing Us Down : The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, has become a modern classic of today’s home-schooling movement. His latest book, The Underground History of American Education, chronicles the often-chilling origins of our schooling system, and details why and how children are damaged by it. Extensively researched and thoroughly documented, it is the standard by which all critiques of compulsory schooling must now be compared.

Today Gatto is busy working on The Fourth Purpose, a three-part, six-hour documentary series which “will tackle the American school system: present, past, and future—its anomalies, its history, and the alternatives. The idea is to throw a bucket of ice-cold water in the faces of pundits, experts, and bureaucrats.” You can find out more about it—as well as read his latest book for free, by the way—on his website: www.johntaylorgatto.com.

Here are some things that the top 20 elite private boarding schools think of as prime constituents of a good education:

1. Strong competency in public speaking and writing.
2. The discipline of gracious manners—a discipline based on the understanding that civility and respect are the foundations of all productive relationships.
3. A comprehensive theory of human nature, drawn from history, philosophy, literature, theology and close observation.
4. Ease and fluency with the master creations in painting, music, sculpture, dance, design, etc. to stimulate the imagination.
5. Insight into the principal institutional forms.
6. A complete theory of access to any institution or person.
7. The ability to do battle in the marketplace of society.
8. A habit of caution in reasoning.
9. A well-tested judgment.
10. Intellectual courage, resourcefulness and self-confidence.

Join the Military! They will teach you to think in part due to necessity and in part due to experience and training.