John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto is an American author and former school teacher with nearly 30 years of experience in the classroom. He devoted much of his energy to his teaching career, then, following his resignation, authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for the underground classic "Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling", and his magnum opus "The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling".

Main Thesis

What does the school do to children? Gatto asserts the following in "Dumbing Us Down":

1. It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.

2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.

3. It makes them indifferent.

4. It makes them emotionally dependent.

5. It makes them intellectually dependent.

6. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).

7. It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.[13]

8. He also draws a contrast between communities and “networks,” with the former being healthy, and schools being examples of the latter; in the United States, networks have become an unhealthy substitute for community.

“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 aids and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work 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 different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”