- John in class with his
kids
-
- From the back
cover:
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- John Taylor Gatto has just resigned
[1992] after 26 years of award-winning teaching in
Manhattan's public schools. He will continue practicing his unique
guerrilla curriculum with the Albany Free School, while travelling
around the country to promote a radical transformation of state
schooling.
-
- Dumbing Us Down reveals the
deadening heart of compulsory state schooling: assumptions and
structures that stamp out the selfknowledge, curiosity,
concentration and solitude essential to learning. Between
schooling and television, our children have precious little time
to learn for themselves about the community they live in, or the
lives they might lead. Instead, they are schooled to merely obey
orders and become smoothly functioning cogs in the industrial
machine.
In his 26 years of teaching, John
Taylor Gatto has found that independent study, community service,
large doses of solitude and a thousand different apprenticeships
with adults of all walks of life are the keys to helping children
break the thrall of our conforming society. For the sake of our
children and our communities, John Taylor Gatto urges all of us to
get schools out of the way and find ways to re-engage children and
families in actively controlling our culture, economy and society.
-
- "John Gatto's splendid writings say
exactly what needs to be said. I just hope people are listening."
- Christopher Lasch,
author, The True and Only Heaven
-
- "These are moving and powerful
pieces. I shall reread them many times."
- Deborah W. Meier,
Founder, Central Park East Secondary School, East
Harlem
-
- Advance Praise for Dumbing Us
Down:
-
- Ever since winning notice as the
New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto has been
offered opportunities to share his critique of compulsory
education. People from all across North America responded so
strongly to his talks and occasional articles, that we asked him
to write the longer pieces collected here in Dumbing Us DowrL
Here's some of what people are saying about John's
work
-
- "Your words hit the nail on the
head. Our schools leave no time for kids to be with parents and
the community. The seeds of your ideas are here ready to sprout."
-
- Bonni McKeown,
Capon Springs, WV
-
- "I heard you speak on the
McNeill/Lehrer News Hour and am in complete agreement with you.
When I first started teaching here, I was amazed to find
everything the same as in New York City~the same insane
assumptions, the same insane beliefs, the same insane way of doing
things, the same lack of education."
-
- Ed Rauchut, NEH
Teacher/Scholar for Nebraska, Omaha, NE
-
- "Your words very concisely captured
all my frustrations and concerns of wanting to be an 'educator' in
a society that schools well but fails to educate. Amen, Amen,
Amen! is my response."
-
- Kathleen Trumbull,
Teacher, Silver Bay, MN
-
- "I am not an educator, nor a
parent, nor a concerned citizen. I am a product of the problems
you describe. Although I had a passionate desire to learn, some
excellent teachers and a diploma, I realized very soon how almost
useless the whole experience had been for me. Parents, students,
especially the students, need to know the things you talk about."
- Praya Desai,
Philadelphia, PA
- "Anyone like John Gatto, with the
courage and tenacity to go against the bureaucratic hierarchy, is
looked upon as a troublemaker. But the principles that John
espouses are really not new or radical, but fundamental to
learning anything. The fact that that they seem controversial to
current administrators shows how far they have strayed from the
real purpose of their employment."
- Ron Hitchon,
Intermodal East, Secaucus, NJ
-
- "Your analysis of the crisis in
schooling, its difference from real education and the relation
between schooling/television and the apathetic blindered world
view so prevalent among Americans really gets to the root of our
disintegrated society. "
-
- David Werner, The
Hesperian Foundation, Palo Alto, CA
-
- "What you say is really happening
on my island. It is very true that schooling is made for those
people who are intended to be controlled and their lives
predicted."
- Alfred T. Apatang,
Rota, M.P.
-
- "You have enlightened as well as
frightened me. I win think carefully about many many things but
ever so carefully about bringing the human spirit back into my
classroom to help my children see and feel the wholeness of their
lives."
- Ruth Schmitt, Tuba
City, AZ
- Publisher's Note
-
- The social philosopher Hannah
Arendt once wrote that, "The aim of totalitarian education has
never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to
form any. "*
-
- If one were to poll our nation's
leading educators about what the goal of our educational systems
should be, I suspect one would come up with as many goals as
educators. But I also imagine that the capacity to form one's own
convictions independent of what was being taught in the classroom,
the ability to think critically based upon one's own experience,
would not rank high on many lists. In fact, the idea that the goal
of education might have little to do with what goes on in the
classroom would likely strike most educators, of whatever
political stripe, as heresy.
-
- In the context of our culture, it
is easy to see that critical thinking is a threat. As parents, we
all want what is "best" for our children. Yet, by our own actions
and lifestyles, and through the demands that we place on our
educational institutions, it is clear that by "best" we
all-too-often mean . most." This shift from the qualitative to the
quantitative, fi7om thinking about what is best for the holistic
development of the individual human being to thinking about which
resources should be available to serni-monopoly governmental
educational institutions certainly does not bear close scrutiny.
-
- Shouldn't we also ask ourselves
what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the "most" of
everything to our children in a world of fast-dwindling resources?
What does the mad and often brutally competitive scramble for
resources-for more pay for teachers, for more equipment, for more
money for schools-teach our children about us? More crucially,
what message does this mad scramble send to those children who,
through no fault of their own, lose out in the competition? And
what would be the cost to the social fabric if our children's
convictions were based on their experience? (Perhaps we are
already paying the cost of the development of such convictions,
however poorly articulated, in the forms of violence, chemical
dependency, teenage pregnancy, and a host of other social fils
affecting today's young people?)
-
- Eclectic, engaging, and not readily
pigeon-holed, John Taylor Gatto's thinking forces us to re-examine
some of our most cherished assumptions in the light of his and his
students'day-to-day experience. He provides few ready made
solutions or optimistic answers for the future of our schools.
What he does provide through the example of his twenty-six years
of teaching is first a commitment to providing quality options to
the poor and disadvantaged, who are most in need of them, and
second conscienticization so that at least his students come to
some critical understanding of what is being done to them in the
name of "schooling."
-
- Gatto's vision of our social order
may be bleak, but It also provides at least a ray of hope in the
example and idea that free-thinking and critically aware
indviduals, freely united in newly reconstructed communities can
correct social Ills and lead us toward a future truly worth living
in. Because we share the conviction that this is both desirable
and possible, we at New Society Publishers are proud to publish
Dumbing Us DowrL
-
- David H. Albert
for New Society Publishers 13 June 1991
-
- *Hanna Arendt,
Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1968), p168.
-
- Click here
to read a chapter from the book.
- Back
to the Review page
- Back
to Gatto page
