Why Homeschooling Moms Should Learn from John Taylor Gatto | Education and Faith Insights

Lately, we’ve been discussing the importance of mommies becoming educated in education before they educate their own children (that’s a lot of “educate”s!).

So, I’ve been recommending books to read and people to follow.  

Today I am going to feature one of my favorites on this topic, a man whose writing continues to fascinate me–John Taylor Gatto.   

(Actually, I think I learned more about how NOT to teach children from this man than anyone else.) 

Gatto was born and grew up along the Monongahela in Pennsylvania in a steel industry community. As a young person his time was spent in college, intermixed with a stint in the army.  

Eventually he ended up in New York City and tried  substitute teaching (after borrowing the teaching credentials of his roommate). Within the same year he attained his own teaching degree and started instructing children in earnest. 

He taught in numerous schools around New York, some rich, others quite poor. One was the dumping ground for troubled students.  

Everywhere he worked he was astonished at what wreckage was left in the wake of one failed school initiative after another. While most teachers became overwhelmed and gave in to the status quo, Gatto became energized.  

Instead of going through the motions and passing failing children on to the next grade to become someone else’s problem, he approached the situation from a totally different perspective. In time he developed his own methods of education, which he later dubbed his “guerilla program.” 

Amazingly, his methods made a difference. Students, the ones deemed hopeless, who had been under Gatto’s tutelage were doing some amazing, positive things, and it was gaining the attention of parents and officials alike.

Eventually, he was awarded New York City Teacher of the Year for 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991. 

Interestingly, he used the occasion of his state award to announce his resignation in the Wall Street Journal’s Op Ed page. It had the title, “I Quit, I Think.” Here is the letter:

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. 

The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the faith that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid. 

That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its “scientific” presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of biology. 

It’s a religious idea and school is its church. New York City hires me to be a priest. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid. 

Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession something like this would happen. Professional interest is best served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating laity to priesthood. School has become too vital a jobs project, contract-giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches. 

That’s why reforms come and go-without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different. 

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. 

For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education.” After a few months she’ll be locked into her place forever. 

In 26 years of teaching rich kids and poor, I almost never met a “learning disabled” child; hardly ever met a “gifted and talented” one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by the human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling. 

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. 

There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen–that probably guarantees it won’t. 

How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum, or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn, or deliberate indifference to it. 

I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work, I think. 

After reading through Gatto’s books and articles, I found the scoop on his decision to quit. It seems his method depended upon getting kids out of school during the day, doing “field trips” to places like town hall where people were getting things done. As his success and popularity grew, it cast a dark shadow on conventional schooling, and administrators and other teachers began to resent Gatto. And so, they stopped granting him permission to take his students out, and they put other policies in place which made his guerilla curriculum impossible, so the truth is that he wasn’t quitting, he was being forced out. He asserted the same has happened to other teachers of the latter part of the 20th century who dared defy the system within the system, including Jaimie Escalante, the hero of the film Stand And Deliver who taught calculus to low-income students in Los Angeles.  

It’s worth thinking hard about why that has to be true in a system which is compelled to spend vast amounts of money on a regular basis, in a system based on social control and competition, and in a system with aspirations, however latent, to achieve utopia. In none of these cases which describe the commonality of American schooling is a good teacher much more than a danger. This explains why schoolteachers like Jaime Escalante and Marva Collins were driven from their schools in spite of such favorable attention from national media. They didn’t understand what was expected of them–or they rebelled. 

John T. Gatto

The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know? 

This is just a small sampling of Gatto’s influential work, and I find it “quite enthusing,” as my upper crust friends might say… 

I am hoping you gathered the most important element Gatto offers us: 

Schooling hasn’t degraded. It is doing the exact job it was created to do: it has dumbed us down.  

Now, when I graduated from high school I believed just the opposite. I was the upper 10% of my class, or Track A, and I was told, based on my test scores, that I could go to Harvard and skip an entire year. My teachers had placed the idea in my mind that I was a highly educated individual.  

But when I started homeschooling, I found out just how ignorant I was. Just about every day I discovered things which most persons of distinction in the past considered invaluable, yet were entirely missing from my own education. Things like the classics of literature, and how science dovetails perfectly with the Bible. I found out that history, too, was not about a bunch of random events, but there was a definite rhythm and rhyme to the whole thing. Even math was different than what I was led to believe. 

It peeved me no end that I had been subjected to total nonsense all the years I was told to sit still and shut up. And I wondered why.  

Then I read Gatto’s “Dumbing Us Down” and “The Underground History of Education” and understood how it all happened.  

This is the gist: 

In the beginning, our nation was founded without conventional schooling. We have been led to believe that this was haphazard and inefficient, which should have produced a nation of ignorant illiterates, but it didn’t. 

In fact, the literacy rate among the colonists is much higher than in our day. This from Gatto in The Underground History of American Education: 

Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1 840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own? 

Then, things shifted. As the Industrial Revolution revved up, so did the social engineers. Horace Mann was chief among them, and man of seeming limitless enthusiasm for imprisoning children “for the good of society.”  

Seems he and some others took a trip to Prussia, what we would today call Germany, to spy out just how to go about harnessing an entire population “for the good of society.”  

What he found there was a system of schooling formulated by tyrants who wanted to produce a country of cannon-fodder.  

Seriously, the Friedrich’s of Prussia wanted to be known for their magnificent armies, and so they sought to create an entire society based on obedience to orders.  

To understand this, we must understand how wars were fought in those days. Men faced each other in long lines, and then, on command, they lowered their muskets and shot each other. I can’t imagine what it must have meant to be in that front line–wondering where the bullet would strike. There weren’t any trees to dodge behind, no way to “zig-zag” and avoid the bullet. You were required to stand and be shot at. Simple. 

So, the commanders could not think of the soldiers as people; as sons with moms sitting at home crying for them. No, they had to become numbers, as little tin figures on a playing board to be moved around at will.  

Cannon fodder refers to soldiers who are considered expendable in battle, often sent into combat with a high likelihood of being killed or injured. The term is used to describe those who are treated as mere resources for achieving military objectives. 

And the soldiers could not be allowed to think of themselves as persons, either. When asked to jump, the only response allowed was, “How high?” 

The only way to produce such automatons was to adopt the practices of ancient Sparta of Greece. In that society, children were not the possessions of their parents, they were possessions of the state. They were removed from their families at young ages and hardened into soldiering, even the young girls.  

This was no utopian, Disney dream, this was harsh and inhumane. Encyclopedia Britannica states, “The sparsity of ruins from antiquity around the modern city [of Sparta] reflects the austerity of the military oligarchy.” No imposing buildings, or statuary or murals; no burial tombs with artifacts of sentimentality. Nothing left to speak of the souls of the people who lived and died there.  

Thankfully, the Spartan state did not survive into the years after Christ. However, this did not keep the Prussians from attempting to rule with the same ideals.  

Thomas Alexander studied the Prussian Education System and had this to say about it in 1918: 

The Prussian citizen cannot be free to do and act for himself; that the Prussian is to a large measure enslaved through the medium of his school; that his learning instead of making him his own master forges the chain by which he is held in servitude; that the whole scheme of the Prussian elementary school education is shaped with the express purpose of making ninety-nine out of every one hundred citizens subservient . . . The elementary schools of Prussia have been fashioned so as to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of the lower classes. 

This is what Horace Mann sought to bring to America: a form of schooling which would shape American citizens into soldiers, or workers, or cogs in the wheel of industry. This is why we have subjects split into a bunch of bits, or bells that we must obey during the school day. It is all obedience training. 

With this in mind, we shouldn’t be shocked at what our schools have turned into. It was only a matter of time.  

At first, of course, the effects were hardly detectable. The family and the local church still held sway over the community, so the Prussian school system could only have a tiny influence. But this was slowly eroded. Eventually, the ideals of a society trained and ordered by common schools gained total control, until we can hardly imagine anything else.  

And so Prussian Schooling, and other systems like it, has been snatched up by all sorts of tyrants and oligarchical political systems across time all over the world. Hitler used it. The Soviets used it. The Robber Barons and coal kings in America used it. Current oligarchs have just about maxed it out.  

Actually, schools are not failing. They are operating exactly as created. They are producing persons who cannot effectively read, write, or do arithmetic. These individuals are not individual at all, but part of a mass of “useful idiots” reacting according to a set of stimuli pre-engineered and put in place from early childhood.  

And you and I, as products of this mass educational system, are meant to be of that same class of “useful idots”–cannon fodder for our modern age. 

But I believe there is something higher which elevates us all and releases us from the plans of despots: and that is Jesus.  

No matter what the kingdoms of the earth may try, God is still in control. His truth never runs out, and His purposes are being accomplished. He is not limited by any aims of the elite; Psalms 2 and 37 say that He looks at their evil designs and sits in the heavens and laughs, for He sees their day is coming. 

And, for all the attempts at the opposite, we are rediscovering our freedoms. Right under their noses, a revolution has begun which cannot be stopped. All the while, one evil experiment after another is being exposed.  

I want to end this post here, but there is so much more I would like to tell you about Gatto, his experiences, and his conclusions. I think it’s prudent to stop, however, so I can have more time to go into depth; perhaps add several quotes from him.  

Meanwhile, you can do your own investigation by reading his books, such as Dumbing Us Down, The Underground History of American Education, and Instruments of Mass Instruction. You’ll be happy to know they are free online, although I enjoy having my own copies. Here are some affiliate links to them on Amazon (I receive a small amount when you purchase them through the links):

Dumbing Us Down

The Underground History of American Education

Weapons of Mass Instruction

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