John Taylor Gatto has been an outspoken and eloquent critic of the public school system for over 20 years, and I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes from him, along with links to his biography, some videos of his speeches and interviews, and more information about this incredibly dynamic and engaging man. Although we’ve only crossed paths a few times over the years, I’m very proud to call him a personal friend.
John Taylor Gatto was the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year when he ended his 30-year teaching career with a flourish, with an essay he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, titled “I Quit, I Think.” In the wake of that opinion piece and a show later that year at Carnegie Hall titled “An Evening with John Taylor Gatto,” he found himself much in demand as a public speaker, and he observed:
“As I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often unvoiced, to be free of managed debate. A desire to be given untainted information. Nobody seemed to have maps of where this thing had come from or why it acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was alive and well all over America.”
From coast to coast, and then circling the globe, John has traveled and lectured about education, children, learning, schooling, and where we’re headed as a society, as a planet.
David Albert, one of our longest-running columnists, wrote about John in 2002 in an essay he titled “The Success of Public Education: A Tribute to John Taylor Gatto on the Publication of the 10th Anniversary Edition of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (New Society Publishers, 2002).” David was a founder of New Society Publishers, and he was the editor of John’s first book, but he noted that Dumbing Us Down wasn’t actually John’s first book:
“…Gatto’s first book was first published in 1975, a Monarch Notes guide to the late Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
John related to me once, after affixing his signature on my copy — with handwriting only a hair more legible than my own that the Monarch Notes guide, still in print after 26 years, has actually sold hundreds of thousands of copies, making it by far his most widely read work.”
David’s analysis of John’s analysis of Kesey’s book is eye-opening, and gave me a whole new respect for the novel:
“Pivotal to Kesey’s novel, according to Gatto, ‘is the cataclysmic revelation that the inmates of the asylum are not committed but are there of their own free will.’ And the way they are controlled, ultimately, is through guilt, shame, fear, and belittlement. Double hmm.”
David muses:
“I doubt that a set of Monarch Notes has ever been heaped with literary praise before, but Gatto’s are much deserving. His description of the Keseyan institutional world contained in this incendiary set of crib notes… is as compelling as the novel itself.”
Here’s a little of John Taylor Gatto at his best:
“There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints.”
“In 30 years of teaching kids rich 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 human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.”
“I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?”
“One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams.”
“You wouldn’t build a home without some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child’s mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.”
A short history of John Taylor Gatto, edited from his biography at The Odysseus Group site:
John Taylor Gatto was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. He attended public schools and a private Catholic boarding school in Pennsylvania, did undergraduate work at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia, then served in the U.S. Army medical corps, after which he did graduate work at the City University of New York, Hunter College, Yeshiva, the University of California, and Cornell.
After college, John Taylor Gatto worked as a scriptwriter, an advertising writer, a taxi driver, a jewelry designer, an ASCAP songwriter, and a hotdog vendor before becoming a schoolteacher, and during his schoolteaching years he also entered the caviar trade, conducted an antique business, operated a rare book search service, and founded Lava Mt. Records, an award-winning documentary record producer.
After being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions Gatto was awarded New York State Teacher of the Year. He ended his 29-year teaching career on the OP-ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991, while still New York State Teacher of the Year, in an essay titled “I Quit, I Think,” claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that same year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries.
John Taylor Gatto’s books include:
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
The Exhausted School (1993)
A Different Kind of Teacher (2000)
The Underground History Of American Education (2001)
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
YouTube Videos with John Taylor Gatto:
The link above goes to multiple videos, including this one:
J.T. Gatto interviewed by Lennart Mogren, Sweden, March 2003
John Taylor Gatto is a learned eloquent critic of the present school system all over the world. In this interview he exposes the hidden agenda that makes most of us hate school. I have written a book, “Sluta skolan!”, on my own experiences and views and I have come to the same conclusions as Mr Gatto has. He exposes the dark and terrifying machinery behind the scenes. Mr Gatto gíves us hope and tools to start dismantling this hideous institution. In my view parents need to get in charge of their kids’ education in new loving and nurturing ways. Mr Gatto is a great inspiration for those of us who realize this.
Tags: David Albert, Dumbing Us Down, homeschooling, John Taylor Gatto, Ken Kesey, New Society Publishers, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, public school critic
