One can’t hide (Schooling and homework assignments deny children privacy and free time in which to learn from parents, from exploration, or from community.) Provisional self-esteem (“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests, is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.”)ħ. Intellectual dependency (One of the biggest lessons schools teach is conformity rather than curiosity.)Ħ. Emotional dependency (Kids are taught to surrender their individuality to a “predestined chain of command.”)ĥ. Indifference (Inflexible school regimens deprive children of complete experiences.)Ĥ. Class position (Children are locked together into categories where the lesson is that “everyone has a proper place in the pyramid.”)ģ. Confusion (The natural order of real life is violated by heaping disconnected facts on students.)Ģ. Who else would stand up and tell us that schooling as we know it is not education, but a “twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned”?Īccording to Gatto’s observations, the seven lessons taught in public schools from Harlem to Hollywood Hills are these:ġ. The publishers of Dumbing Us Down call Gatto’s ideas about education “not easily pigeon-holed,” which is an accurate observation. “Government schooling,” he charged, “kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.” Gatto announced he was going to quit because he didn’t want to “hurt” kids anymore. Just after receiving the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year Award, Mr. Gatto, and along with him it lost much of the smokescreen that has enabled it to remain so remarkably unchallenged over the years. He describes the town as “an altogether wonderful place to grow up, even to grow up poor,” a place where “independence, toughness, and self-reliance were honored,” and where, he says, he “learned to teach from being taught by everyone in town.”Ī year and a half ago, the public school system lost Mr.
But his “heart and habit,” he asserts in his “Biographical Note,” are still in Monongahela, the small riverside town in Pennsylvania where he spent his early years. Gatto taught for 26 years in New York City public schools, a number of these years in Harlem and Spanish Harlem. Gatto and his eye-opening book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, I must offer first of all a few words on the author himself.
If John Taylor Gatto were introducing his book to us, he’d do us the favor of introducing himself first.
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