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    Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
    Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
    Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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    Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

    By John Taylor Gatto

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    About this ebook

    Throw off the shackles of formal schooling and embark upon a rich journey of self-directed, life-long learning

    After over 100 years of mandatory schooling in the U.S., literacy rates have dropped, families are fragmented, learning "disabilities" are skyrocketing, and children and youth are increasingly disaffected. Thirty years of teaching in the public school system led John Taylor Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling is to blame, accomplishing little but to teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine.

    He became a fierce advocate of families and young people taking back education and learning, arguing that "genius is as common as dirt," but that conventional schooling is driving out the natural curiosity and problem-solving skills we're born with, replacing it with rule-following, fragmented time, and disillusionment.

    Gatto's radical treatise on public education, a bestseller for 25 years, continues to bang the drum for an unshackling of children and learning from formal schooling. Now, in an ever-more-rapidly changing world with an explosion of alternative routes to learning, it's poised to continue to shake the world of institutional education for many more years.

    Featuring a new foreword from Zachary Slayback, an Ivy League dropout and cofounder of tech start-up career foundry Praxis, this 25th anniversary edition will inspire new generations of parents and students to take control of learning and kickstart an empowered society of self-directed lifetime-learners.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Society Publishers
    Release dateMay 19, 2017
    ISBN9781771422444
    Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
    Author

    John Taylor Gatto

    John Gatto was a schoolteacher for 30 years. He resigned in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times upon receiving the New York State Teacher of the Year award. He has been a fierce advocate for self-directed "guerrilla" education for decades, and is also the author of Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education. John Gatto lived in New York State.

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    Reviews for Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition

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    • 4/5
      Written by a man that taught in the monopoly called public school system, won awards for it, and lists what he taught;
      confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, and provisional self-esteem.
      The national curriculum is a joke. And what is different from this book compared to others, he doesn't just list the things that are wrong with the system or bash the system. Mr. Gatto gives suggestions of tearing the institution apart and rebuilding it. Something I've yet to read anyone else do.
      There's interesting historical information about children in Massachusetts in 1850 being forced to go to public school at gun point. Not a good start and it hasn't improved much.
    • 5/5
      A heartfelt read. It surely appears to have been a heartfelt write. John writes with a tone of urgency, and revolution, as if calling soldiers to arms in the defense of their country. He is calling us to bear witness to a national crisis: The crisis of education, particularly the acute crisis in our schools. In a larger sense he is writing about the dire condition of our communities as a whole. His message is no less pertinent today than it was seventeen years ago when he first published his essays.
    • 5/5
      A scathing description of the problems of our current educational system. A good read for any parent, and also for many students, to better understand why some illogical educational decisions only make sense in the context of building compliant workers rather than free thinkers. My only complaint is that Gatto offers homeschooling as a panacea without much deeper discussion into how difficult it can be to produce a great homeschooling environment.
    • 5/5
      Everyone should be required to read this short book. It offers a devastating critique of institutional schooling by an award-winning teacher. You should know what the schools are really teaching before you trust them with your children!
    • 5/5
      everyone should read this book. it will challenge your views on compulsory education and might compel you to question whether it is such a good idea (especially given its sinister historical roots). extremely thought-provoking!
    • 4/5
      Gatto's Dumbing Us Down is an interesting combination of state-schooling critique and school-choice advocacy. What makes it something special is Gatto's penchant for taking off the gloves and ranting about the outright evils of bad schools, and the social/cultural attitudes they produce. Gatto owes a lot to Ivan Illich, and his notion of 'deschooling', but he's not as willing as Illich to cop to how sheerly radical the things he's saying really are. He also isn't much on alternatives: his forays into pre-revolutionary New England congregationalism as a model for community and schooling aren't at all convincing, leaving his overall vision hollow. Gatto's therefore an odd duck: he criticizes the overbearing State like a paleoconservative, but wants desperately to believe in the inherent goodness of human nature, which is leftism/liberalism's signature. Recommended, to get you thinking if nothing else.
    • 5/5
      John Taylor Gatto eventually realized that "the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act." In this book, he quickly makes very convincing points. Among those that resonated most with me: that the grading and IQ scores held so important by schools don't matter much after that, that the institutional networks dominating our society are far less meaningful and supportive than actual community and family, and that learning was more effective before the era of compulsory, factory schooling. He closes with a section on the history of early Massachusetts and the dynamics which led very tight communities to learn and change.
    • 4/5
      3.5 stars. 4 is too generous while 3 is unfair. The book brought up some interesting points, but nothing to write home about.
    • 3/5
      While I was prepared for the degree to which this book was an indictment of our public education system, I was unprepared for the degree to which it's an indictment of pretty much our whole society, including education, national government, mass media, etc...

      I have to admit that I'm really still digesting the implications of the book and will probably need to re-read shortly.
    • 4/5
      The only weak spot in this otherwise excellent treatise is the loooong chapter discussing the distinctions between networks and communities. It's a solid critique, but belabored. It drags down the momentum in the middle of the book.
      Outside of that section, I found this immensely readable and inspiring. A classic in radical education for a reason. Prepare to question your allegiance to traditional schooling-- not just where it shows up in the public system but also where it shows up in your own thinking and priorities.
    • 5/5
      This is the second time I have read this book, and I am still amazed at Mr. Gatto's boldness in describing the true nature of government schooling. It's message is just as relevant to today's superficial debate over education as it was when it was written. This book will challenge the way you view our educational system and society!
    • 5/5
      ‘Dumbing us down’ is subtitled, ‘The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling’, and consists of the text of five speeches that the author has made. One of them, was somewhat ironically his acceptance speech after being given an award by his state for being ‘teacher of the year’. Thsi book is considered a classic in home educating circles. The first chapter, ‘The seven-lesson school teacher’, outlines what the author perceives as the ‘lessons’ taught across the United States, no matter what the subject. The first lesson he mentions is ‘confusion’ - the non-connectedness of everything, something which often seems to be the case in standard schooling. On the other hand, the second lesson, ‘Class position’, is something I didn’t relate to. Until secondary school, I don’t remember having grades at all; perhaps the UK has not yet gone so far down the 'dumbing' path as the US. Still, there's plenty to think about. Gatto argues that there are serious problems with the lack of privacy in schools and the need to learn what teachers decide rather than according to the student’s interests. This book isn’t to attack education or classrooms as such; Gatto is, after all, a teacher himself. He merely wants to demonstrate the difficulties that can arise with the principle of classroom schooling as we know it, where the student has little say in what he learns. Obviously some schools are a great deal better than others.Much of the book ties in with other books I’ve been reading on different topics, and issues in everyday life. I found myself several times seeing schooling as a metaphor for other aspects of human existence. Highly recommended to anyone interested in education, whether at school or at home, and indeed to anyone interested in seeing how government restrictions can cause us to accept something that makes no sense at all when we think about it rationally.
    • 4/5
      Mr. Gatto describes teaching as follows:

      In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.


      And from that we infer a teacher's job is to magnify a child's inherent genius and diminish its inherent shortcomings.

      To be such a sculptor of personality, bringing forth the beauty within a plain-looking child, a teacher needs freedom; he needs the licence to act according to a child's personal needs. But the education system doesn't allow that to happen.

      Mr. Gatto makes a great observation when he says that children have no time to discover themselves:

      My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about eight hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of seven hours a week in homework — a total of 45 hours. During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no pri-
      vate time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time — not much because they’ve lost
      the tradition of family dining — but if we allot three hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of nine hours per week.


      In such circumstances children are even afraid of intimacy:

      The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence
      of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.


      Another theme which Gatto explores is the separation of children and old people from the mainstream. He thinks you learn more when you are in harmony with differently-aged people than when you are with equals.

      Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the term “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that.


      What is the solution?

      Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no largescale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education.


      This book explains extremely well what's wrong with the system but I'm not satisfied with the solutions and so I have given this book 4-stars.
    • 2/5
      Although there were a few good points brought up in this book it really misses the mark as far as fixing things.

      One of the problems the author singles out as an issue in the public schools is that children are learning how to be competitive in the school environment (grades, sports, and such). One solution offered is a type of homeschooling in which parents take bids from teachers who COMPETE with each other to earn the right to teach the child. Wait a minute...we don't want our children in a school environment that stresses competitiveness and part of the solution is employing a teacher using a competitive hiring system? It just seemed odd to me.

      He mentions that this system should be operated much like the free market, you know, the one that recently collapsed and had to be bailed out by government. I don't think I would choose that as the prototype for the system I wish to educate my children with. Another issue with this system would be that families with more money would be able to "bid" more for teachers as opposed to a less financially stable family.

      Another issue mentioned is that of the two wage earner family. I agree with his points in regards to this setup being detrimental to children. However this setup has evolved as a result of the economy as well as the government. In order to change education, you first have to change the economy and the way the government oversee's education. What good are reforms at the local or state level when the federal government can attempt override those changes if they so wish to?

      Overall there were a lot of points that I agreed with the author on. I wish he had addressed the multitide of other factors that also need to be addressed if true educational reforms are to take place.

    Book preview

    Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition - John Taylor Gatto

    Preface

    About the Author

    I’m here to talk to you about ideas, but I think a purpose might be served in telling a little bit about myself so I become a person like you rather than just another talking head from the television set. I know that sometimes when I hear a news report from TV I wonder, Who are you? and, Why are you telling me these things? So let me offer you some of the ground out of which these ideas grew.

    I’ve worked as a New York City schoolteacher for the past thirty years, teaching for some of that time elite children from Manhattan’s Upper West Side between Lincoln Center, where the opera is, and Columbia University, where the defense contracts are; and teaching, in most recent years, children from Harlem and Spanish Harlem whose lives are shaped by the dangerous undercurrents of the industrial city in decay. I’ve taught at six different schools in that time. My present school is in the shadow of St. John the Divine Cathedral, the largest Gothic structure in the United States, and not a long walk from the famous Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. About three blocks from my school is the spot where the Central Park jogger (as media mythology refers to her) was raped and brutally beaten a few years ago—seven of the nine attackers went to school in my district.

    My own perspective on things, however, was shaped a long way from New York City, in the river town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania, forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. In those days, Monongahela was a place of steel mills and coal mines, of paddle-wheel river steamers churning the emerald green water chemical orange, of respect for hard work and family life. Monongahela was a place with muted class distinctions since everyone was more or less poor, although very few, I suspect, knew they were poor. It was a place where independence, toughness, and self-reliance were honored, a place where pride in ethnic and local culture was very intense. It was an altogether wonderful place to grow up, even to grow up poor. People talked to each other, minding each other’s business instead of the abstract business of the world. Indeed, the larger world hardly extended beyond Pittsburgh, a wonderful dark steel city worth a trip to see once or twice a year. Nobody in my memory felt confined by Monongahela or dwelled, within my earshot, on the possibility they were missing something important by not being elsewhere.

    My grandfather was the town printer and had been for a time the publisher of the town newspaper, The Daily Republican—a name that attracted some attention because the town was a stronghold of the Democratic Party. From my grandfather and his independent German ways, I learned a great deal that I might have missed if I had grown up in a time, like today, when old people are put away in a home or kept out of sight.

    Living in Manhattan has been for me in many ways like living on the moon. Even though I’ve been here for thirty-five years, my heart and habit are still in Monongahela. Nevertheless, the shock of Manhattan’s very different society and values sharpened my sense of difference and made me an anthropologist as well as a schoolteacher. Over the past thirty years, I’ve used my classes as a laboratory where I could learn a broader range of what human possibility is—the whole catalogue of hopes and fears—and also as a place where I could study what releases and what inhibits human power.

    During that time, I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn’t want to accept that notion—far from it: my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended.

    The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence—insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality—that I became confused. They didn’t do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

    Bit by bit I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow as many of the kids I taught as possible the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage. In simpler terms, I tried to maneuver them into positions where they would have a chance to be their own teachers and to make themselves the major text of their own education.

    In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.

    A black and white photo of an older couple standing close together in an open field, smiling. The man's head rests affectionately on the woman's shoulder. The woman is holding a walking stick and has her arm around the man. They are both dressed in outdoor casual wear. The setting appears to be rural, with trees in the distance under a clear sky.

    In other words, I dropped the idea that I was an expert whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself. I no longer felt comfortable defining my work as bestowing wisdom on a struggling classroom audience. Although I continue to this day in those futile assays because of the nature of institutional teaching, wherever possible I have broken with teaching tradition and sent kids down their separate paths to their own private truths.

    The sociology of government monopoly schools has evolved in such a way that a premise like mine jeopardizes the total institution if it spreads. Kept contained, the occasional teacher who makes a discovery like mine is at worst an annoyance to the chain of command (which has evolved automatic defenses to isolate such bacilli and then to neutralize or destroy them). But once loose, the idea could imperil the central assumptions that allow the institutional school to sustain itself, such as the false assumption that it is difficult to learn to read, or that kids resist learning, and many more. Indeed, the very stability of our economy is threatened by any form of education that might change the nature of the human product schools now turn out: the economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained, for example, to think critically.

    Success in my practice involves a large component of automatic trust, categorical trust, not the kind conditional on performance. People have to be allowed to make their own mistakes and to try again, or they will never master themselves, although they may well seem to be competent when they have in fact only memorized or imitated someone else’s performance. Success in my practice also involves challenging many comfortable assumptions about what is worth learning and out of what material a good life is fashioned.

    Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned. Over the years, I have come to see that whatever I thought I was doing as a teacher, most of what I actually was doing was teaching an invisible curriculum that reinforced the myths of the school institution and those of an economy based on caste. When I was trying to decide what to say to you that might make my experience as a schoolteacher useful, it occurred to me that I could best serve by telling you what I do that is wrong, rather than what I do that is right. What I do that is right is simple to understand: I get out of kids’ way, I give them space and time and respect. What I do that is wrong, however, is strange, complex, and frightening. Let me begin to show you what that

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