The Interview with Gatto
Valerie
The Spirit of Ma'at Vol 2 May 2001
John Taylor Gatto :The Most Famous Teacher in the World
by Diane M. Cooper
If John Taylor Gatto had your ear - especially if you are a parent -
he
might ask you some pretty strange questions:
* What if it could be absolutely proved to you that the American
educational
system was designed by financiers who felt that self-reliant, self-
educated
American citizens made poor factory workers and rotten consumers?
* What if you could become convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that
literacy in the United States was at its highest point just before
compulsory education was signed into law?
* What if there is a really scarey parallel between school bells and
bugle
calls, and it's not accidental?
* Could any of this make even a little dent in the beliefs we have
been
spoonfed by our media about ''Why Johnny Can't Read''?
Forty years ago, Gatto was an advertising copywriter who became bored
with
the ad business and needed a place to ''mark time'' while he thought
things
through. His roommate at that time had a teaching license but wasn't
using
it. ''It was sitting in a drawer,'' Gatto says. ''He taught for one
day,
tossed his license in a drawer, and said you'd have to be crazy to do
that
for a living.''
So using his roommate's license, Gatto started substitute
teaching ''just to
see what it was like.''
He soon became intrigued by the responsibility the job offered. ''If
you
dropped dead,'' he told us, ''there aren't many businesses that would
miss
you, not even if you were the CEO. But teaching school was
different.''
He ended up teaching for 30 years, as what he calls a ''saboteur'' -
someone
who tries to change the system simply by refusing to follow it. Along
the
way, he learned some sobering, basically frightening, facts about the
true
intent of ''government'' education in our public schools.
Today, he says, he is ''in constant motion, in every one of the fifty
states
and seven or eight foreign countries, bearing witness to what I saw
in that
30-year period.''
Here, the Spirit of Ma'at interviews this amazing man whose insight
and
knowledge have brought a new breath of healing air into the closed
classroom. Author of Dumbing Us Down and The Underground History of
American
Education, John Taylor Gatto, although he's no longer operating from
within
the system, is still ''the most famous teacher in the United States.''
Diane: How did you happen to get so completely sidetracked from the
advertising business?
John: What I think happened was a series of events which occurred
when I was
substitute teaching, where I seemed to run into a densely compacted
mass of
perversion on the part of nominal authorities. In challenging or
testing
myself against these authorities, I became genuinely intrigued by what
appeared to be massive stupidity. It seemed that things that were
very easy
to accomplish were being made impossible to accomplish by the very
structure
of the system itself, and its guardians.
I decided to take a year or two out of the advertising business and
teach. I
thought I'd go back, eventually, and make a fortune in advertising.
But each
week I stayed in teaching, I became more enthralled by the political
challenges.
Today, after 40 years of thinking about this business, I see that the
obstacles that are generated structurally have nothing to do with
stupidity.
And that they are virtually insuperable unless somebody's ready to
play the
saboteur.
A couple years ago, Mort Zukerman, the publisher of US News and World
Report
and the Atlantic Monthly, said that our wonderful economy is
self-maintaining because our people are not like any other people in
the
world. They are interested only in their paycheck. They don't mess
around
with management. They define themselves by what they buy, and they
throw
away what they buy as soon as they buy it. They mortgage their
futures.
As I read that article, I said to myself, How do people get this way?
Well, they get this way by being schooled to be that way.
Diane: So how did our schools get to be that way.
John: Look at our school system as a laboratory, and then you can see
that
the physical habits that are trained into our children quite
purposefully
limit and defeat them. You have to ask someone's permission to go to
the
toilet. You have to sit in a cramped seat from nine to three with
virtually
no ability to get up and move around. These things would be deadly
even for
adults. For children it's a colossal perversion.
Nor are there any known intellectual explanations, based on academic
results, for any of this behavior.
And the people who stand before these children - the teachers - are
the
single worst-performing group in American colleges. If that's not
radical
enough, the people who manage the people who stand before the
children -
that is, the superintendents - are considerably more ignorant than
the most
ignorant subgroup among the teachers.
Now, I believe you'd have to be terminally innocent to believe that
this
inverted pyramid could have occurred by accident. But it is the only
way to
keep the system intact. You put the worst people in charge, and the
second-worst people in charge of the kids. And you do this in second,
third,
and fourth grades. Kids either learn to think critically at that age,
or 95
percent of the time, they never do.
And, starting out in kindergarten, sitting in our schools makes people
restless - with each other, with themselves, with their families,
with their
possessions. When you can make people generally discontented with
everything, you have the perfect climate for a successful mass-
production
economy. And when you have people who don't understand anything
except some
little specialty - like how to drill a tooth, how to argue a case in
court,
some little thing - you have the perfect climate for running
everything
centrally. Specialists don't see themselves as citizens.
Diane: So how did this happen, if it wasn't an accident?
John: If you look at the annual reports of the Carnegie Foundation
beginning
about 1906, you'll find out where schooling and its structure came
from.
You'll find out what its goals are. And it is nothing to do with any
debate
being conducted in any press or any forum in the United States, today
or any
other year that I'm aware of.
If you take the window of 1890 to 1910, what was traditionally
thought of as
''schooling'' began to vanish. It was replaced by a kind of global
experiment in human behavior, in human obedience, tractability, and
conditioning. Our schools today are a laboratory of human behavior.
A lot of this you can deduce logically. If you've got a small-farm,
agricultural economy, it's easy to see the qualities people will
need: the
ability to be alone with themselves for long periods of time, to be
utterly
resourceful, to be able to fix anything that broke.
So what if you've suddenly got a mass production economy where the
machinery
has to run night and day in order to pay for itself. How could you
train
these self-sufficient, resourceful kids to support such an economy?
That was
the question.
How it happened was not a secret. Between 1890 and 1910, there were
masses
of public statements made by the owners of the new economy,
statements that
were extremely anti-intellectual, extremely demanding of what they
wanted
schools to produce. And on higher levels, such as the Harvard Ed.
Journal,
there were actually bald statements of what these demands were all
about.
You can't accuse these people of being conspiratorial. They were very
open
about what they were bringing about - which was, in part, the death of
capitalism.
Diane: So how did they mean to accomplish this?
John: Their method was to model our schools after the Prussians. The
Prussians had figured out in the early part of the 19th century, long
before
we had forced schooling ourselves, that if you lock all the kids up
and keep
them amused with colors, games, music, and balloons until they're
about ten
or eleven, then all of a sudden you crack down and say, Okay, the fun
is
over, those children will never recover their volition, their
independence -
their minds. They will become wonderful soldiers and workers. Even if
they
can conceive of opposition, they won't be able to sustain it.
This is how Germany produced the most successful armies that have
ever been
seen in history. Even in its lost wars, even when outnumbered two to
one and
more, Germany regularly inflicted thirty to forty percent more
casualties
than those it fought against. The army worked like a well-tuned
machine
because no one ever argued with orders.
Diane: So the developers of our compulsory education system adopted
that
system?
John: Yes. People went to Germany in the late 19th and early 20th
century
and came back with these coveted German PhDs - we didn't have our own
PhDs
yet - and they took over the presidencies and the heads of key
departments
in every major American university.
Diane: I was looking at the word ''kindergarten'' and it dawned on me
that
that, too, is a German phrase.
John: Yes, and it doesn't mean ''a garden for children.'' It means a
garden
where teachers cultivate children like vegetables. Frederick Frobel -
the
guy who invented kindergarten - had a life-long dream to be a member
of the
Prussian Army, but they wouldn't take him because he was born in
Austria.
Diane: So the system is about our economy?
John: People who believe that organized schooling can be about
anything else
than serving the existing economy are out of their minds. I feel a
great
deal of sympathy for these people, the huggy kind, because they don't
deserve what they get, and they certainly don't deserve to waste their
life's energy and their heart's blood fighting imaginary battles on
imaginary battlefields.
But there isn't any way for a centralized school operation not to be
about
the dominant economy. You can argue till you're blue in the face. And
if
you're a mother, you'll be arguing with a school teacher, or a
principal, or
a superintendant. And when you do, you're arguing with someone who
has no
power at all. None of those roles has any power at all. The only way
they
can step out of their powerless role is to play the role of saboteur.
Because the system, by definition, has no room for debate. It may
feign
debate as a way to bleed away public discontent, but by definition,
there is
no room for real debate. The system is systematic - if it's not
systematic,
it's not a system anymore. It collapses. There is no wiggle room at
all.
Diane: A while ago, you said the change to our school system was in
order to
bring about an end to capitalism. Could you say more about that? I
thought
we still had capitalism.
John: It's true that we are all racing around screaming at each other
about
who's the greatest capitalist. But it's impossible any longer to be a
capitalist - there is no competition left that matters at all.
I'll give you a few pieces of evidence: Lockheed and Boeing should
have gone
out of business years ago. They weren't allowed to go bankrupt
because your
tax dollars were used to buoy them up until they could sustain
themselves
again.
Chrysler is another corporation that should have gone bankrupt a long
time
ago. There is no reason for Chrysler to be in business except for
massive
injections of federal tax money.
The government issues bogus contracts, and simply buys things that are
junked instantly, all in order to keep these few central corporations
in
business. Chrysler is just one of the most flagrant examples.
In my later life I've been dumbfounded that otherwise intelligent
people -
certainly my intellectual peers - can look at the words and the story
and
are unable to see the meaning. Some of them could pass a quiz about
when
Chrysler went bankrupt, and what year the government bail-out
occurred, and
what size it was - but they have no idea of the significance of this.
Our economy is basically centralized in 200 corporations who are
totally
dependent on government privilege. These corporations require the
government
to stamp out any competition that emerges, and they require the
government
to pick them up when they stumble and fall, and bail them out with
public
funds.
There's no competition. There hasn't been since the end of the second
World
War. And as I implied earlier, the plan to destroy capitalism was
announced
by Carnegie and company back in the 1890s. They said that only stupid
people
and fools competed. That competition was a huge waste of energy and
profit,
and that there was room for anyone who wanted to play ball. They said
that
the democratic populace of the country was getting in the way, so the
populace was going to have to be put out of commission. These
statements
were made quite openly. But no one paid any attention.
Then these ideas were written into legislation.
In Silicon Valley, for example, they succeeded in outdistancing their
competition through government intercession, guaranteed contracts,
protected
markets, and guaranteed profits. Then, with that giant stream of
revenue
from the government, they could hire away the creative personnel that
had
developed in places you've never heard of - like someone's garage.
Diane: You call yourself a saboteur. How did you get ''found out''?
John: Saboteurs identify themselves by their radically different
numbers.
Diane: What if the numbers are positive?
John: It doesn't matter. The public perception that good school-
teaching is
desired or rewarded is naive. Teaching is a ''guild'' system, and
unlike
what we were taught in school, guilds were not about ensuring
quality. In a
guild, the idea was to ensure that nobody used a technology or method
unless
everyone else was using it. There is no innovation in a guild.
Diane: Well, we can see that schoolteachers aren't necessarily honored
guildmembers, either. Not if you gauge it by the pay rate.
John: I would dispute that. The national average for teachers right
now is
about $41,000 for a nine-month year - comparable to about $55,000.
That's
the average. The upper end of the scale, in most places, is around
$70,000.
That doesn't match the range of a doctor or a lawyer, of course...
Diane: Most of the teachers I've heard of are not making that kind of
money...
John: You believe that because that's the stuff that's pumped out by
the
teachers' unions. The reality is quite different.
Teachers need only a very indifferent education, and in return, they
get a
guaranteed pension, medical plan, and income that is certainly
adequate, if
not munificent. It seems to me that American teaching as a career is
one of
the great deals in human history, especially for people who, by and
large,
are not very accomplished themselves. Many teachers' hearts could
bear a
very close scrutiny - but not their intellects or their
accomplishments, or
even their understanding.
It's funny, you can take five-year-olds off the street, and teach
them in
about two weeks to do all the arithmetic operations mentally -
really, up to
multiplying four or five figures! That's all it would take, two
weeks. Even
accomplished mathematicians say that the entire mathematics curriculum
through calculus and trig takes about 50 contact hours to deliver.
The consensus is that it takes 30 contact hours to bring someone to
the
point where they can be a self-teacher in reading for the rest of
their
lives.
When we see kids who can't read, we're seeing the results of a radical
dysfunction that is transmitted by schooling. We're talking about
things
that are very, very easy to learn.
The funny thing is, it's very, very easy to put children back on
track to
where they can self-teach. But that's not allowed! That sort of thing
really
is severely punished by structured schooling.
I'm not suggesting that teachers, principals, or even superintendents
understand that this is what's going on. They do what they are
instructed to
do by the orders that are passed down - from where, they don't know,
but
they do know that if those orders aren't followed, some people are
going to
get in a lot of trouble.
Diane: Do you think the rebellion that we are seeing within our
children
today - the murders, the drugs, the high crime, and so on - is the
American
psyche saying that they've had enough?
John: Yes. Plato said that before you can make a new society you have
to
wipe the slate clean. One way to do that was to wipe our children's
minds
clean of history, philosophy, literature - all the things that used to
provide models of human behavior and the range of human choice.
What was also required to reach the path we are in now was for four
or five
generations of parents to become progressively weaker, more isolated
from
reality, more specialized, dependent, addicted to purchasing - so
that each
succeeding generation of parents, from somewhere around 1910 on, has
had
less to teach its own children. The consequence is that children are
learning very early on to disrespect their parents. They are learning
to
keep two sets of books... to lie with an easy heart...
So now, with the existing adult generation providing no models to
follow at
all, you see children casting their lot with a basketball player or a
singer
or a comedian - or God knows what. Television actors. Commercial
musicians.
Diane: So how are we going to change this?
John: We're not going to change it. This system will overthrow itself.
There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that that is happening
right now.
But it isn't going to happen in the halls of Congress. I think it's
useful
to argue in the streets, but that also has limited utility, and it's
too
easy to cripple the few leaders.
The system will come apart because it has become so anti-life that it
now
has to spend huge amounts of its energy watching out for people like
me. The
saboteurs.
If you want to accelerate the procedure, you absolutely have to do it
individually, on a family-by-family basis. And maybe in little
neighborhoods
or private associations, but not by linking together in a big
countersystem.
That can be self-defeating.
Diane: And you say it's already happening.
John: Yes. There is already quite a snowball effect happening.
For example, there can't really be anyone who thinks standardized
tests
measure what they purport to measure. Not the people who make the
tests, and
not the people who administer them. Bill Bradley - who's considered
the
intellectual of the Democratic Party and graduated from Princeton -
had a
480 on the language SAT. That's a moron's score. Senator Paul
Wellstone had
a combined total score in math and language of 800, an astonishingly
low
score. I could go on and on with examples like that. Bush had a 550,
and he
graduated from Yale! If you can be a Senator, a Governor, or the
President
with these numbers, why not anything else? Why the atmosphere of
threat and
fear schools use as ''motivation''?
And there have been regular ''test revolts'' for the past ten years.
But the
papers, which are owned by those few corporations we talked about,
were not
allowed to report them for fear that it would give other people ideas.
Then recently, a hundred mothers in Scarsdale, the richest community
in the
United States, have refused to allow their kids to take standardized
tests.
Diane: And that's having an effect?
John: That's made the front page. When a hundred mothers in
Scarsdale -
every one of them in a $2 million home or better - make a stand, then
the
papers can no longer refuse to cover it. Because now the decay has
reached
the very group that supposedly protects the system.
So a lot has happened. I cast my own lot 40 years ago as a saboteur,
and it
would be difficult to quantify the damage I've done, but I know that
it's
been considerable.
And there's more to come. As I travel around the country I find
people of
every persuasion who are doing it - they probably don't think they are
sabotaging, but that's what it is. When you react against a system's
directives, you're sabotaging the system. That system may be a
million times
stronger than you. But it's not unlimited. It doesn't have an
unlimited
ability to suppress all these reactions.
Diane: So it will be family by family making a stand?
John: It's going to be conversations like you and I are having right
now.
And passing that on.
Gatto has the following works on the web:
* johntaylorgatto.com: Gatto's web site includes information about his
important new book, The Underground History of American Education,
and about
other projects he is working on.
* Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling: a
selection from the book of this name.
* Education and the Western Spiritual Tradition: An address by John
Taylor
Gatto at the "Spirituality In Education" conference, sponsored by the
Naropa
Institute, focusing on The Congregational Principle and Original Sin.
* Bootie Zimmer's Choice: Gatto uses the way he learned to read from
his
mother, Bootie Zimmer, as an example of the independent learning that
is
crushed by compulsory schooling.
* The Origins of Compulsory Education: A history of how the system of
compulsory education was invented in Prussia and imported to the
United
States.
* The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher: an essay that shows how schools crush
students' spirits.
* The Nine Assumptions of Modern Schooling: a brief description of
the ways
that modern schools stop children from learning.
* The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher: A longer essay on the way that our
schools get
in the way of learning.
* Thoughts on Education: an article reprinted from Homefires - The
Journal
of Homeschooling.
* The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy
individual thought? An argument against public schooling and in favor
of a
voucher system.
* The Curriculum of Necessity: The curriculum that is actually needed
to
succeed cannot be taught in schools.
* Personal Solutions, Family Solutions: Gatto explains why he decided
not to
improve his country land -- following the Buddha's maxim: "Do
nothing. Time
is too precious to waste."
* What Really Matters, part 1 and part 2: A two-part essay on why our
technological society is unsatisfying.
* We Need Less School, Not More : Schools are mechanical institutions
that
drain the vitality of families and communities.
* Interview: Gatto is interviewed by former California governor Jerry
Brown.
There is also a brief synopsis of this interview on this page.
* I may be a teacher, but I'm not an educator: In this article from
the Wall
Street Journal, Gatto explains why he cannot continue as a teacher.
* Acceptance Speech: The acceptance speech that Gatto gave when he
was given
the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 1990.
* Essays by Gatto: A number of essays by John Taylor Gatto.
John Taylor Gatto :The Most Famous Teacher in the World
by Diane M. Cooper
If John Taylor Gatto had your ear - especially if you are a parent -
he
might ask you some pretty strange questions:
* What if it could be absolutely proved to you that the American
educational
system was designed by financiers who felt that self-reliant, self-
educated
American citizens made poor factory workers and rotten consumers?
* What if you could become convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that
literacy in the United States was at its highest point just before
compulsory education was signed into law?
* What if there is a really scarey parallel between school bells and
bugle
calls, and it's not accidental?
* Could any of this make even a little dent in the beliefs we have
been
spoonfed by our media about ''Why Johnny Can't Read''?
Forty years ago, Gatto was an advertising copywriter who became bored
with
the ad business and needed a place to ''mark time'' while he thought
things
through. His roommate at that time had a teaching license but wasn't
using
it. ''It was sitting in a drawer,'' Gatto says. ''He taught for one
day,
tossed his license in a drawer, and said you'd have to be crazy to do
that
for a living.''
So using his roommate's license, Gatto started substitute
teaching ''just to
see what it was like.''
He soon became intrigued by the responsibility the job offered. ''If
you
dropped dead,'' he told us, ''there aren't many businesses that would
miss
you, not even if you were the CEO. But teaching school was
different.''
He ended up teaching for 30 years, as what he calls a ''saboteur'' -
someone
who tries to change the system simply by refusing to follow it. Along
the
way, he learned some sobering, basically frightening, facts about the
true
intent of ''government'' education in our public schools.
Today, he says, he is ''in constant motion, in every one of the fifty
states
and seven or eight foreign countries, bearing witness to what I saw
in that
30-year period.''
Here, the Spirit of Ma'at interviews this amazing man whose insight
and
knowledge have brought a new breath of healing air into the closed
classroom. Author of Dumbing Us Down and The Underground History of
American
Education, John Taylor Gatto, although he's no longer operating from
within
the system, is still ''the most famous teacher in the United States.''
Diane: How did you happen to get so completely sidetracked from the
advertising business?
John: What I think happened was a series of events which occurred
when I was
substitute teaching, where I seemed to run into a densely compacted
mass of
perversion on the part of nominal authorities. In challenging or
testing
myself against these authorities, I became genuinely intrigued by what
appeared to be massive stupidity. It seemed that things that were
very easy
to accomplish were being made impossible to accomplish by the very
structure
of the system itself, and its guardians.
I decided to take a year or two out of the advertising business and
teach. I
thought I'd go back, eventually, and make a fortune in advertising.
But each
week I stayed in teaching, I became more enthralled by the political
challenges.
Today, after 40 years of thinking about this business, I see that the
obstacles that are generated structurally have nothing to do with
stupidity.
And that they are virtually insuperable unless somebody's ready to
play the
saboteur.
A couple years ago, Mort Zukerman, the publisher of US News and World
Report
and the Atlantic Monthly, said that our wonderful economy is
self-maintaining because our people are not like any other people in
the
world. They are interested only in their paycheck. They don't mess
around
with management. They define themselves by what they buy, and they
throw
away what they buy as soon as they buy it. They mortgage their
futures.
As I read that article, I said to myself, How do people get this way?
Well, they get this way by being schooled to be that way.
Diane: So how did our schools get to be that way.
John: Look at our school system as a laboratory, and then you can see
that
the physical habits that are trained into our children quite
purposefully
limit and defeat them. You have to ask someone's permission to go to
the
toilet. You have to sit in a cramped seat from nine to three with
virtually
no ability to get up and move around. These things would be deadly
even for
adults. For children it's a colossal perversion.
Nor are there any known intellectual explanations, based on academic
results, for any of this behavior.
And the people who stand before these children - the teachers - are
the
single worst-performing group in American colleges. If that's not
radical
enough, the people who manage the people who stand before the
children -
that is, the superintendents - are considerably more ignorant than
the most
ignorant subgroup among the teachers.
Now, I believe you'd have to be terminally innocent to believe that
this
inverted pyramid could have occurred by accident. But it is the only
way to
keep the system intact. You put the worst people in charge, and the
second-worst people in charge of the kids. And you do this in second,
third,
and fourth grades. Kids either learn to think critically at that age,
or 95
percent of the time, they never do.
And, starting out in kindergarten, sitting in our schools makes people
restless - with each other, with themselves, with their families,
with their
possessions. When you can make people generally discontented with
everything, you have the perfect climate for a successful mass-
production
economy. And when you have people who don't understand anything
except some
little specialty - like how to drill a tooth, how to argue a case in
court,
some little thing - you have the perfect climate for running
everything
centrally. Specialists don't see themselves as citizens.
Diane: So how did this happen, if it wasn't an accident?
John: If you look at the annual reports of the Carnegie Foundation
beginning
about 1906, you'll find out where schooling and its structure came
from.
You'll find out what its goals are. And it is nothing to do with any
debate
being conducted in any press or any forum in the United States, today
or any
other year that I'm aware of.
If you take the window of 1890 to 1910, what was traditionally
thought of as
''schooling'' began to vanish. It was replaced by a kind of global
experiment in human behavior, in human obedience, tractability, and
conditioning. Our schools today are a laboratory of human behavior.
A lot of this you can deduce logically. If you've got a small-farm,
agricultural economy, it's easy to see the qualities people will
need: the
ability to be alone with themselves for long periods of time, to be
utterly
resourceful, to be able to fix anything that broke.
So what if you've suddenly got a mass production economy where the
machinery
has to run night and day in order to pay for itself. How could you
train
these self-sufficient, resourceful kids to support such an economy?
That was
the question.
How it happened was not a secret. Between 1890 and 1910, there were
masses
of public statements made by the owners of the new economy,
statements that
were extremely anti-intellectual, extremely demanding of what they
wanted
schools to produce. And on higher levels, such as the Harvard Ed.
Journal,
there were actually bald statements of what these demands were all
about.
You can't accuse these people of being conspiratorial. They were very
open
about what they were bringing about - which was, in part, the death of
capitalism.
Diane: So how did they mean to accomplish this?
John: Their method was to model our schools after the Prussians. The
Prussians had figured out in the early part of the 19th century, long
before
we had forced schooling ourselves, that if you lock all the kids up
and keep
them amused with colors, games, music, and balloons until they're
about ten
or eleven, then all of a sudden you crack down and say, Okay, the fun
is
over, those children will never recover their volition, their
independence -
their minds. They will become wonderful soldiers and workers. Even if
they
can conceive of opposition, they won't be able to sustain it.
This is how Germany produced the most successful armies that have
ever been
seen in history. Even in its lost wars, even when outnumbered two to
one and
more, Germany regularly inflicted thirty to forty percent more
casualties
than those it fought against. The army worked like a well-tuned
machine
because no one ever argued with orders.
Diane: So the developers of our compulsory education system adopted
that
system?
John: Yes. People went to Germany in the late 19th and early 20th
century
and came back with these coveted German PhDs - we didn't have our own
PhDs
yet - and they took over the presidencies and the heads of key
departments
in every major American university.
Diane: I was looking at the word ''kindergarten'' and it dawned on me
that
that, too, is a German phrase.
John: Yes, and it doesn't mean ''a garden for children.'' It means a
garden
where teachers cultivate children like vegetables. Frederick Frobel -
the
guy who invented kindergarten - had a life-long dream to be a member
of the
Prussian Army, but they wouldn't take him because he was born in
Austria.
Diane: So the system is about our economy?
John: People who believe that organized schooling can be about
anything else
than serving the existing economy are out of their minds. I feel a
great
deal of sympathy for these people, the huggy kind, because they don't
deserve what they get, and they certainly don't deserve to waste their
life's energy and their heart's blood fighting imaginary battles on
imaginary battlefields.
But there isn't any way for a centralized school operation not to be
about
the dominant economy. You can argue till you're blue in the face. And
if
you're a mother, you'll be arguing with a school teacher, or a
principal, or
a superintendant. And when you do, you're arguing with someone who
has no
power at all. None of those roles has any power at all. The only way
they
can step out of their powerless role is to play the role of saboteur.
Because the system, by definition, has no room for debate. It may
feign
debate as a way to bleed away public discontent, but by definition,
there is
no room for real debate. The system is systematic - if it's not
systematic,
it's not a system anymore. It collapses. There is no wiggle room at
all.
Diane: A while ago, you said the change to our school system was in
order to
bring about an end to capitalism. Could you say more about that? I
thought
we still had capitalism.
John: It's true that we are all racing around screaming at each other
about
who's the greatest capitalist. But it's impossible any longer to be a
capitalist - there is no competition left that matters at all.
I'll give you a few pieces of evidence: Lockheed and Boeing should
have gone
out of business years ago. They weren't allowed to go bankrupt
because your
tax dollars were used to buoy them up until they could sustain
themselves
again.
Chrysler is another corporation that should have gone bankrupt a long
time
ago. There is no reason for Chrysler to be in business except for
massive
injections of federal tax money.
The government issues bogus contracts, and simply buys things that are
junked instantly, all in order to keep these few central corporations
in
business. Chrysler is just one of the most flagrant examples.
In my later life I've been dumbfounded that otherwise intelligent
people -
certainly my intellectual peers - can look at the words and the story
and
are unable to see the meaning. Some of them could pass a quiz about
when
Chrysler went bankrupt, and what year the government bail-out
occurred, and
what size it was - but they have no idea of the significance of this.
Our economy is basically centralized in 200 corporations who are
totally
dependent on government privilege. These corporations require the
government
to stamp out any competition that emerges, and they require the
government
to pick them up when they stumble and fall, and bail them out with
public
funds.
There's no competition. There hasn't been since the end of the second
World
War. And as I implied earlier, the plan to destroy capitalism was
announced
by Carnegie and company back in the 1890s. They said that only stupid
people
and fools competed. That competition was a huge waste of energy and
profit,
and that there was room for anyone who wanted to play ball. They said
that
the democratic populace of the country was getting in the way, so the
populace was going to have to be put out of commission. These
statements
were made quite openly. But no one paid any attention.
Then these ideas were written into legislation.
In Silicon Valley, for example, they succeeded in outdistancing their
competition through government intercession, guaranteed contracts,
protected
markets, and guaranteed profits. Then, with that giant stream of
revenue
from the government, they could hire away the creative personnel that
had
developed in places you've never heard of - like someone's garage.
Diane: You call yourself a saboteur. How did you get ''found out''?
John: Saboteurs identify themselves by their radically different
numbers.
Diane: What if the numbers are positive?
John: It doesn't matter. The public perception that good school-
teaching is
desired or rewarded is naive. Teaching is a ''guild'' system, and
unlike
what we were taught in school, guilds were not about ensuring
quality. In a
guild, the idea was to ensure that nobody used a technology or method
unless
everyone else was using it. There is no innovation in a guild.
Diane: Well, we can see that schoolteachers aren't necessarily honored
guildmembers, either. Not if you gauge it by the pay rate.
John: I would dispute that. The national average for teachers right
now is
about $41,000 for a nine-month year - comparable to about $55,000.
That's
the average. The upper end of the scale, in most places, is around
$70,000.
That doesn't match the range of a doctor or a lawyer, of course...
Diane: Most of the teachers I've heard of are not making that kind of
money...
John: You believe that because that's the stuff that's pumped out by
the
teachers' unions. The reality is quite different.
Teachers need only a very indifferent education, and in return, they
get a
guaranteed pension, medical plan, and income that is certainly
adequate, if
not munificent. It seems to me that American teaching as a career is
one of
the great deals in human history, especially for people who, by and
large,
are not very accomplished themselves. Many teachers' hearts could
bear a
very close scrutiny - but not their intellects or their
accomplishments, or
even their understanding.
It's funny, you can take five-year-olds off the street, and teach
them in
about two weeks to do all the arithmetic operations mentally -
really, up to
multiplying four or five figures! That's all it would take, two
weeks. Even
accomplished mathematicians say that the entire mathematics curriculum
through calculus and trig takes about 50 contact hours to deliver.
The consensus is that it takes 30 contact hours to bring someone to
the
point where they can be a self-teacher in reading for the rest of
their
lives.
When we see kids who can't read, we're seeing the results of a radical
dysfunction that is transmitted by schooling. We're talking about
things
that are very, very easy to learn.
The funny thing is, it's very, very easy to put children back on
track to
where they can self-teach. But that's not allowed! That sort of thing
really
is severely punished by structured schooling.
I'm not suggesting that teachers, principals, or even superintendents
understand that this is what's going on. They do what they are
instructed to
do by the orders that are passed down - from where, they don't know,
but
they do know that if those orders aren't followed, some people are
going to
get in a lot of trouble.
Diane: Do you think the rebellion that we are seeing within our
children
today - the murders, the drugs, the high crime, and so on - is the
American
psyche saying that they've had enough?
John: Yes. Plato said that before you can make a new society you have
to
wipe the slate clean. One way to do that was to wipe our children's
minds
clean of history, philosophy, literature - all the things that used to
provide models of human behavior and the range of human choice.
What was also required to reach the path we are in now was for four
or five
generations of parents to become progressively weaker, more isolated
from
reality, more specialized, dependent, addicted to purchasing - so
that each
succeeding generation of parents, from somewhere around 1910 on, has
had
less to teach its own children. The consequence is that children are
learning very early on to disrespect their parents. They are learning
to
keep two sets of books... to lie with an easy heart...
So now, with the existing adult generation providing no models to
follow at
all, you see children casting their lot with a basketball player or a
singer
or a comedian - or God knows what. Television actors. Commercial
musicians.
Diane: So how are we going to change this?
John: We're not going to change it. This system will overthrow itself.
There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that that is happening
right now.
But it isn't going to happen in the halls of Congress. I think it's
useful
to argue in the streets, but that also has limited utility, and it's
too
easy to cripple the few leaders.
The system will come apart because it has become so anti-life that it
now
has to spend huge amounts of its energy watching out for people like
me. The
saboteurs.
If you want to accelerate the procedure, you absolutely have to do it
individually, on a family-by-family basis. And maybe in little
neighborhoods
or private associations, but not by linking together in a big
countersystem.
That can be self-defeating.
Diane: And you say it's already happening.
John: Yes. There is already quite a snowball effect happening.
For example, there can't really be anyone who thinks standardized
tests
measure what they purport to measure. Not the people who make the
tests, and
not the people who administer them. Bill Bradley - who's considered
the
intellectual of the Democratic Party and graduated from Princeton -
had a
480 on the language SAT. That's a moron's score. Senator Paul
Wellstone had
a combined total score in math and language of 800, an astonishingly
low
score. I could go on and on with examples like that. Bush had a 550,
and he
graduated from Yale! If you can be a Senator, a Governor, or the
President
with these numbers, why not anything else? Why the atmosphere of
threat and
fear schools use as ''motivation''?
And there have been regular ''test revolts'' for the past ten years.
But the
papers, which are owned by those few corporations we talked about,
were not
allowed to report them for fear that it would give other people ideas.
Then recently, a hundred mothers in Scarsdale, the richest community
in the
United States, have refused to allow their kids to take standardized
tests.
Diane: And that's having an effect?
John: That's made the front page. When a hundred mothers in
Scarsdale -
every one of them in a $2 million home or better - make a stand, then
the
papers can no longer refuse to cover it. Because now the decay has
reached
the very group that supposedly protects the system.
So a lot has happened. I cast my own lot 40 years ago as a saboteur,
and it
would be difficult to quantify the damage I've done, but I know that
it's
been considerable.
And there's more to come. As I travel around the country I find
people of
every persuasion who are doing it - they probably don't think they are
sabotaging, but that's what it is. When you react against a system's
directives, you're sabotaging the system. That system may be a
million times
stronger than you. But it's not unlimited. It doesn't have an
unlimited
ability to suppress all these reactions.
Diane: So it will be family by family making a stand?
John: It's going to be conversations like you and I are having right
now.
And passing that on.
Gatto has the following works on the web:
* johntaylorgatto.com: Gatto's web site includes information about his
important new book, The Underground History of American Education,
and about
other projects he is working on.
* Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling: a
selection from the book of this name.
* Education and the Western Spiritual Tradition: An address by John
Taylor
Gatto at the "Spirituality In Education" conference, sponsored by the
Naropa
Institute, focusing on The Congregational Principle and Original Sin.
* Bootie Zimmer's Choice: Gatto uses the way he learned to read from
his
mother, Bootie Zimmer, as an example of the independent learning that
is
crushed by compulsory schooling.
* The Origins of Compulsory Education: A history of how the system of
compulsory education was invented in Prussia and imported to the
United
States.
* The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher: an essay that shows how schools crush
students' spirits.
* The Nine Assumptions of Modern Schooling: a brief description of
the ways
that modern schools stop children from learning.
* The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher: A longer essay on the way that our
schools get
in the way of learning.
* Thoughts on Education: an article reprinted from Homefires - The
Journal
of Homeschooling.
* The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy
individual thought? An argument against public schooling and in favor
of a
voucher system.
* The Curriculum of Necessity: The curriculum that is actually needed
to
succeed cannot be taught in schools.
* Personal Solutions, Family Solutions: Gatto explains why he decided
not to
improve his country land -- following the Buddha's maxim: "Do
nothing. Time
is too precious to waste."
* What Really Matters, part 1 and part 2: A two-part essay on why our
technological society is unsatisfying.
* We Need Less School, Not More : Schools are mechanical institutions
that
drain the vitality of families and communities.
* Interview: Gatto is interviewed by former California governor Jerry
Brown.
There is also a brief synopsis of this interview on this page.
* I may be a teacher, but I'm not an educator: In this article from
the Wall
Street Journal, Gatto explains why he cannot continue as a teacher.
* Acceptance Speech: The acceptance speech that Gatto gave when he
was given
the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 1990.
* Essays by Gatto: A number of essays by John Taylor Gatto.