Last night, the passing of the great author and educator John Taylor Gatto was disclosed by researcher and film maker Richard Grove, who has become somewhat of an unofficial spokesperson for Gatto.
John Taylor Gatto was New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. After years of struggling with the state mandated curriculum, he eventually decided to quit teaching in government schools.
He quit at the height of his teaching career by posting an article in the Wall Street Journal OP Ed pages entitled “I quit, I think”.
In his resignation he admitted that he could no longer continue a career where he was forced to hurt children and ruin their minds year after year. The harm that he felt he was inflicting on children was not directly physical, but was a kind of subliminal brainwashing that took place through what Gatto referred to as “the hidden curriculum”.
Gatto recognized that the structure of modern schooling was designed in such a way to discourage creativity, independence and individuality while reinforcing obedience to authority. His Wall Street journal article started with the following:
“I’ve taught public school for 26 years but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think. I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true. Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren’t meant to participate in our form of schooling, rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.”
Learning is a necessary part of our advancement on this earth, but that doesn't mean that education is. If we are not able to create a better learning environment for our children then they will be doomed to repeat the same madness that came before them. The whole structure of our education system is completely unnecessary, and never was relevant to begin with.
Given the right conditions to grow, a child’s mind would be able to do incredible things, but they will become thoughtless drones if they are forced into a strict regimen where they are not able to think creatively and freely.
Do some research into John Taylor Gatto to explore his ideas and contributions further.