John Taylor Gatto: Schooling is not Education - Part 1

In this 1991 interview, former school teacher John Taylor Gatto talks about the difference between "schooling" through public schools and true education. What really matters? Does "Schooling" as we know it today create whole human beings?

I hope that you find this interview as inspiring and informative as I did.

For more information visit: www.johntaylorgatto.com

The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (ISBN 0-945700-05-9, pbk. ISBN 0-945700-04-0) is a critique of the U.S. education system by John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto, a former teacher, left the classroom the same year in which he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. He announced his decision in a letter titled "I Quit, I Think".

Using anecdotes gathered from thirty years of teaching, Gatto presents his view of modern compulsion schooling, describing a "conflict between systems which offer physical safety and certainty at the cost of suppressing free will, and those which offer liberty at the price of constant risk". Gatto argues that educational strategies promoted by government and industry leaders for over a century included the creation of a system that keeps real power in the hands of very few people.

From the book's Introduction:

"... Underground History isn’t a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it’s a good start, I believe, but much remains undone."

"... what I’m trying to describe [is] that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century."

Russ Kick offers this in summary:

"In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately."

Classrooms of the Heart - John Gatto (1991)

John Taylor Gatto speaks about schools and brainwashing

John Taylor Gatto: Schooling is not Education - Part 4