Sunday 25 October 2015

John Taylor Gatto is such an interesting thinker on education that I intend to devote two posts to him.
He was an American teacher for 30 years and won 4 awards as 'Teacher of the Year' in New York City and State.
Like John Holt, the more he experienced the world of the modern school, the more he became convinced that the mere construct of school was anti-educational.
He is best known for his classic book Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.  Wade A. Carpenter, associate professor of education at Berry College, called Gatto's work 'scathing' and 'hyperbolic' but not 'inaccurate'.  Despite his criticism, the professor says that he is in agreement with Gatto.
JTG lectured for years on the benefits of homeschooling, unschooling and open source learning.


I cannot resist supplying a quotation from Gatto's book on dumbing down.  More next week.
I have noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: 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 really don't 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 humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

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