John Taylor Gatto series

Radio Free School interview with John Taylor Gatto, author of The Underground History of American Education, Dumbing Us Down, and others. (30 minutes)

The Province of Ontario spends $14 billion per year on schools. Per capita student funding for
public schools in Hamilton works out to $7,681.00 per student per year, yet, despite massive
funding, schools are places we largely take for granted. And when schools routinely fail to
educate, the predictable response is to throw more money at the problem.
The problem with schools is not just a matter of money, and according to John Taylor Gatto we
should be looking very critically at the very system of forced “factory”schooling.
“If we reduce it to a simple statement like, ‘I want you to surrender your child for the next 12
years, for the principle part of the day, five days a week to a set of total strangers who you will
know nothing about what so ever, you’ll be lucky if you know what they look like or if you get
three minutes with them in the course of a year to exchange platitudes with....would you give your
television set to someone you couldn’t check up on?’”
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the
author, most recently, of the Underground History of American Education. His earlier Dumbing
Us Down is an underground classic imbued with insights gained from working the front lines in a
school industry that fails to fulfill a useful or effective educative role.
Gatto is featured in a multi-part Radio Free School series beginning Wednesday, December 15,
12 noon to 12:30 p.m.
According to Gatto, the three key goals of schools historically had to do with giving students the
skills to help them be good citizens, good people, and to live a life of their choosing.
But along the way a destructive fourth purpose was introduced, negating the first three. Says
Gatto, “Horace Mann (1796-1859), and Egerton Ryerson (1803-1882) in Canada, were out for the
same thing - to produce a labour force which would not seek an independent livelihood and were
it so silly as to try wouldn’t know how to do that, wouldn’t have the equipment— the idea was to
create a population that was susceptible to management”. A Managerial, fourth purpose. A fourth
purpose that according to Gatto has worked very well and continues to work ever more smoothly-
fashioning a “docile flock of sheep, that will do as it is told.”
In an extensive interview with Radio Free School Gatto tells about what was really going on
behind the backs of the everyday folk of the time:
“The ‘progressive insight’ that increasingly was made in those drawing rooms where the
livelihood of the small farmers and trades men and crafts people was about to be transformed into
the corporate economy was ‘well, the devil with trying to convince older people- we will pass
legislation forcing them to yield up their children to be confined for long periods of time with total
strangers who we will have a one hundred percent influence on...hiring and on what they say,’
now if that isn’t the single most radical idea in human history, I don’t know what’s close to it.”
Gatto and his Odysseus Group continue historical research into the origins of the US education
system, and are currently working on a film called the Fourth Purpose Documentary series that
will be the first to radically explore the fundamental question about the purpose of education.
The critique of state control over education found a seminal voice with William Godwin (1756-
1836) in England

“The project of a national education ought uniformly to be discouraged, on account of its obvious
alliance with national government. This is an alliance of a more formidable nature, than the old
and much contested alliance of church and state. Before we put so powerful a machine under the
direction of so ambiguous an agent, it behoves us to consider well what it is that we do.
Government will not fail to employ it, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions....
Had the scheme of a national education been adopted when despotism was most triumphant, it is
not to be believed that it could have for ever stifled the voice of truth. But it would have been the
most formidable and profound contrivance for that purpose, that imagination can suggest. Still, in
the countries where liberty chiefly prevails, it is reasonably to be assumed that there are important
errors, and a national education has the most direct tendency to perpetuate those errors, and to
form all minds upon one model.”
Where is this all leading us to? And how can we get out of this imprisonment? listen to John
Taylor Gatto on Radio Free School this Wednesday at 12:00 p.m.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com