Neal's Workshop

John Taylor Gatto taught English in New York City schools for 30 years. During that time, he learned how absolutely busted the public education system is in the United States. Upon his retirement, he wrote a seditious book titled, The Underground History of American Education. Rather than a desire to understand why public schools are so flawed, Gatto's ideas have struck me by opening my eyes to how my own experience in public education has impacted who I am and how I approach life.

Follow up:

An October 2000 article on Gatto noted the following:

In 1991, [Gatto] was New York State's Teacher of the Year. Then he quit.

"When I left school teaching, I was blind with rage. I didn't know whose throat to grab first," growls Gatto . . . "After a while, I could see that responsibility for education had to be revested in ordinary people." . . .

"I'm a saboteur," he says. "I'm sabotaging the idea that you know best what my family needs."

Schools, he says, are irremediably broken. Built to supply a mass-production economy with a docile workforce, they ask too little of children, and thereby drain youngsters of curiosity and autonomy. Tougher discipline, more standardized tests, longer days, and most other conventional solutions are laughably short of the mark. "We need to kill the poison plant we created," Gatto has written. "School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged." His alternative: to get rid of institutional mass-production schools, allow every imaginable experiment to blossom, make free public libraries universal, and expand hands-on apprenticeships.

Gatto's proposal seems simple to me: tear the sacred notion of schooling to pieces. Return the responsibility for education to families. The idea that some one-size-fits-all education is right for everyone is absurd and damaging. Even the notion that all kids should go to school for the first 20 years of their life is silly. In the article, Gatto goes on to answer a question:

Why don't schools adopt that ethic [of allowing students to pursue their own goals]? What's standing in the way?

It's a managerial mania, a managerial pathology that shows no signs of having reached a conclusion. For reasons that are both fair and foul -- but mostly for fair reasons -- we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.

In a society that's going to be scientifically managed, what are the things that interfere with the smooth administration of that form of management? Well, for one thing, it's the managers' subordinates saying, "I don't think we should do it that way." A managed life extends your childhood from birth to death. You're never really responsible for your decisions, and you can never really take credit for your successes either.

Let's shift to the world of business and work for a moment. Grades and gold stars in school prepare people for pay raises and promotions on the job, don't they?

They're BS. I'm against those things. But don't make me look like one of those romantic people who are against them because I don't want to see kids compete with one another. Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.

For anyone who has worked or is working in Corporate America (or any bureaucratic organization, for that matter), Gatto's words should be setting off fireworks - they did for me.

Almost everyone I know from school and college is struggling to find identity and passion. It's like my generation doesn't know how to set our own goals or come up with our own worthwhile pursuits. All we know is how to school, take tests and earn degrees. It's absolutely maddening. Aided by Gatto's insights, I think the reason we find ourselves so handicapped is because we were programmed by this busted employee-training ground of a school system. I'm not trying to play the victim: this realization has empowered me to stop looking to mentors and others for guidance on my life. I laugh at myself for having a site about being self-authoritative and introspective but taking so long to ask such a simple question, with no qualifications or "I can'ts" attached: what do I want to pursue with my life? The drive must come from within.

Gatto hammers his vision home with an answer another question:

So what are some lessons for someone who is running a business?

Look at Silicon Valley. Everybody there is working much harder than you could legally require them to work. Why? Because they are working for themselves. It's exciting; the work itself is exciting. To teach people that we work to get money to buy stuff is insane. We work because work is thrilling.

What would turn this country on its head is a commitment by schools to make room for independent livelihoods of all sorts. I mean that, by and large, you set the terms of your own employment, you decide the relative value of the goals that you're after, you stick your neck out, and you take all of the reward or your neck gets chopped off. That would be a dazzling society. It would be like some of my classes were -- just dazzling.

Dazzling, indeed.