Public Schooling, Interview with John Taylor Gatto, NY State Teacher
Document # 029.0.2.0 # 12 >>>>Disclaimer: This document
may be used as
you will except: If you change anything in the text, remove my name and
other Ident. You may use it without my identification also if you wish...I
only ask that people read it and think...think...think. Sources/Ref's if not
in the text will be found on the last page of Doc 000.0.0.1 and 000.0.6.
CLMsr.<<<<
We have a Constitution and our Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments) that
makes us free. Right? Then visit:
http://www.trimonline.org
http://www.getusout.org
http://www.thenewamerican.com
http://www.givemeliberty.org
http://nca.mybravenet.com
http://www.jbs.org
Then take a look at these sites:
http://www.dixierising.com
http://www.dixienet.org
http://www.palmetto.org
http://www.southerncaucus.org
http://www.spofga.org
Subject: Public Schooling. Pls visit:
http://nca.mybravenet.com
Interview / John Taylor Gatto By Amanda Paulson. Special to The Christian
Science Monitor.
John Taylor Gatto had just been named New York State Teacher of the
Year
nine years ago when he made a shocking announcement. After teaching 26 years
in New York City public schools, he was quitting, saying he could no longer
continue to "hurt kids."
Since then, Mr. Gatto has written and lectured extensively on the negative
effects of compulsory schooling. His newest book, "The Underground History
of Education" (Oxford Village Press), will be published in January. Sections
of the book are available online at
www.johntaylorgatto.com
The following are excerpts from a recent Monitor interview:
On why he wrote the book: I had a need after 30 years of fairly successful
teaching, with all kinds of kids, to understand why the business had evolved
the way it had. The first thing I learned was that the school world is not
independent, but a subordinate industry to government and industry and
commerce.
On education before school became compulsory:
My own reading from the first 120 years of American national history is
exactly the same as Alexis de Tocqueville's reading. He says flatly this is
the best-educated nation in the Western world, bar none.... It's just
dazzling what people can do for themselves when the boot of the government
is off their back.
Everybody understood what the home schoolers understand today - [compulsory
school is] nonsense. It becomes a destructive activity to lock people up and
drill them and confine them with low-level abstractions.
On testing:
There's no teacher worth his or her salt who, inside of a period at the
start of the year, doesn't know who's going to get the As, who's going to
get the Bs, who's going to cause trouble.... How do you know when you get a
good haircut? You look in the mirror. What we've allowed to happen is for
normal good judgment and wisdom to be set aside for some kind of
mathematical wizardry. There's nothing a standardized test measures other
than your ability to score well on the next standardized test.
Some assumptions he says are made in modern schooling:
*Government school is a central force for social cohesion ... and a
bureaucratized public order is our only defense against chaos and anarchy.
*The certifiable expertise of schoolteachers is superior to that of lay
people.
*Compelling children to assemble in mandated groups, for mandated intervals,
with mandated texts ... does not interfere with academic learning.
*Children will inevitably grow apart from parents in beliefs as they grow
older, and this process must be encouraged.
On the role of the teacher:
The balance of responsibility was [once] divided much differently. The
assumption was that the kid would do 90 percent of the work and the teacher
10 percent. Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, that assumption
was deliberately reversed. Each time you intervene in a kid's learning past
an allowable minimum, you're actually impeding the process.
On curriculum:
There's no scientific evidence justifying any particular subject selection,
any sequence of subjects, any internal arrangements of time. There is no
body of knowledge inaccessible to a motivated elementary school student. The
rationing of learning by age - and usually it's by social class and age - is
indefensible.
Delinquent behavior is a reaction to the structure of schooling. It's not
some innate characteristic of large groups of children. School makes
children angry because it's a consistently dishonest place and a visibly
unfair place.
On the future of schools:
I see great hope for educational advancement or spiritual advancement. I've
traveled 1.4 million miles in 50 states and seven foreign countries, and
while I've seen a lot less hope overseas, [here] I see effective reform and
resistance everywhere. The most effective of all, bar none, is the home
school revolution. Approximately 2 million people from all social classes
and all religious and cultural backgrounds have, in effect, set up private
labs of education.
What makes a good school?
That the school part is de-emphasized. Furthermore you have to believe that
everybody wants the best. Everybody wants to learn. They'd like to have
worthwhile meaningful work to do.
On what kids are capable of:
I taught 13-year-olds from [the inner city] using the same text and
methodology that was used on me at Cornell and Columbia. I pushed them
harder than I was pushed. I never accepted second-rate work without taking
the kid aside and showing him why it was second-rate.
"....teachers who conform to the traditional institutional mode are out of
place. They might find fulfillment as tap-dance instructors, or guards in
maximum security prisons or proprietors of reducing salons, or agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation - - but they damage teaching, children, and
themselves by staying in the classroom." (NEA book, Schools For the 70's
And Beyond)
The fundamental theory upon which all governments in this Union repose
excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children. The
child is not the mere creature of the state." United States Supreme Court,
Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).
"Traditionally, organized education in the Western world was Church
education. It could hardly be otherwise when the education of children was
primarily study of the Word and the ways of God. Even in the Protestant
countries, where there was a less close identification of Church and State,
the basis of education was largely the Bible, and its chief purpose
inculcation of piety..." United States Supreme Court, McCollum v. Board of
Education, 333 U.S. 203, Justice Felix Frankfurter rendering the court's
opinion.
"But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed
by the Governor and Council, the commissioners of the literary fund, or any
other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each
ward, it is a belief against all experience. Try the principle one step
further and amend the bill so as to commit to the Governor and Council the
management of all our farms, our mills, and merchants' stores. " Letter of
Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, Feb. 2, 1816, reprinted in Political
Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1955), page 98 and The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson (Memorial Edition 1904), volume 14, pages 420-21.
"It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling
that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of
my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do
things." John Taylor Gatto, speech on accepting 1991 New York State teacher
of the year award, reprinted in Gatto's Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden
Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,
1992), pages 1-12.
Over time, this struggle will fan out to other forms of symbolism,
including American symbolism -- evidenced by the recent attempts in Detroit
schools to remove American flags. I'm always amused whenever I hear some
sanctimonious American ultra-nationalist condemning the Confederate flag on
the grounds the Confederate founders and fighting men were treasonous. What
many of these misguided fools don't realize is that their symbolism and
national traditions will soon be next. The recent New Jersey decision not to
teach the Declaration of Independence in the public schools on the grounds
this merely represented right-wing lunacy is a case in point.
Junk Science in the Classroom. The New American, page 5, 26 March 2001
issue.
A few years ago, Howard Lyon, a musician in Erie, Pennsylvania, was
flipping through his daughter's science textbook, Prentice-Hall's widely
used "Exploring Physical Science", when he started noticing errors. Then,
according to the "Boston Globe", "he kept looking until eventually he had
compiled a list of errors that grew to 45 single-spaced pages....." Today,
"Exploring Physical Science", along with 11 other science textbooks widely
used by middle schools around the nation, is coming under fire once again.
According to the "Washington Post", after a two year study of the books,
"researchers compiled 500 pages of errors, ranging from maps showing the
equator passing through the southern United States to a photo of singer
Linda Ronstadt labeled as a silicon crystal." "These are terrible books,
and they're probably a strong component of why we do so poorly in science,"
said John Hubisz, a North Carolina State University physics professor who
led the two year survey. According to the "Post", one textbook even
"mis-states Newtons's first law physics, a staple of physical science for
centuries." How bad are the books? Take, for instance, the periodic table of
the elements. Instead of relying on those published in the middle school
texts, the researchers concluded: "The best chart may be free. Volkswagen's
1999 beetle campaign puts out a periodic table with the VW in the place for
atomic #150- Turbonium. That's fanciful, but the rest of the table is far
more accurate than most.." Why are the books so bad? Instead of working to
make their books accurate and useful, "publishers are much more interested
in satisfying a group of (textbook) selection committee members who
typically have little knowledge of the subject matter, but are impressed by
pretty pictures and seemingly up-to-date new information which for the
intended audience is not at all relevant," say the researchers. And then
there is multi-culturalism. Publishers "get people to check for political
correctness;....they try to get in as much cultural diversity as possible,"
said Hubisz. "They don't seem to understand what science is all about."
"I absolutely believe that the biggest crisis facing this country today is
government education. American parents have surrendered their responsibility
for the education of their children to government -- and increasingly to the
Imperial Federal Government. The results aren't good."
- Radio talk-show host Neil Boortz
A
Chester L McWhorter Sr, c/o 504 N. Brighton Rd, Lecanto, Occupied Florida.
C.S.A. 34461. Ph: 352-344-9073. Fax: Same.
E-mail:
robertthebruce@naturecoast.net
029.0.2.0 # 12 End.
"I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the
most corrupt government on earth." Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, 1800.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the
argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves." William Pitt speech to the
House of Commons.
"You shall have one world government, whether or not you like it, by consent
or by conquest." Former FDR aide, James Warburg CFR/TC, in testimony before
the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 17 Feb 1950.