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Sisyphus Press -- P.O. Box 10495 State College, Pa. 16805-0495 Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by Dr. John Gatto For Orders in U.S. only $13.99 plus $12.99 for S&H. AIR MAIL: For Canadian + International Orders (U.S. checks, money orders, or currency only - no Canadian checks, money orders, or currency) |
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This radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine. In celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Dumbing Us Down and to keep this classic current, we are renewing the cover art, adding new material about John and the impact of the book, and a new Foreword. ----------------- The Blumenfeld Education Letter - May 1993 Reviewed by Samuel L. Blumenfeld No one in America today is better qualified to report on the true condition of our government education system than John Taylor Gatto, the now-famous educator who spent 26 years teaching in six different schools in New York City and quit because he could no longer take part in a system that destroys lives by destroying minds. In 1990 the New York “Senate named Mr. Gatto New York City Teacher of the Year. The speech he gave at that occasion, “The Psychopathic School,” amounted to a devastating indictment of public education (reprinted in BEL, May 1991, under the title “Why Schools Don’t Educate”). In 1991 Mr. Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year, at which occasion he gave a speech, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” so insightful of the wrong-headedness of public education that it will probably become a classic in educational literature. These two remarkable speeches, plus several others, including one entitled “We Need Less School, Not More,” were published in book form last year. And what a powerful book it is, only 104 pages long, readable in one or two sittings. With Outcome-Based Education being imposed on schools across America, we will get much more school, not less, and the content of that schooling will produce far more confusion than we already have. Gatto was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, an industrial river town forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. He writes: “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.” Gatto’s grandfather was the town printer and for a time, the publisher of the town newspaper, The Daily Republican, a source of independent thinking in a stronghold of the Democratic party. The move from Monongahela to Manhattan was quite a jolt for Gatto. The difference in society and values turned Gatto into an anthropologist and in the next twenty-six years he used his classes “as a laboratory where I could learn a broader range of what human possibility is…and also as a place where I could study what releases and what inhibits human power. Like so many university students, Gatto was taught by his professors that intelligence and talent were distributed throughout the population in bell curve predictability. But his experience as a teacher taught him differently. He writes: 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 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. These insights led Gatto to develop a teaching style completely opposite to the methodology taught in the university. He writes: Bit by bit I began to devise guerilla exercises to allow the kids I taught—as many as I was able—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….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. Naturally, Gatto’s methods put him more and more at odds with the system. He explains: The sociology of government monopoly schools has evolved in such a way that a premise like mine jeopardizes the total institution if it spreads….But once loose the idea could imperil the central assumptions which 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. In his speech, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” Gatto describes the seven lessons that are taught in all public schools by all teachers in America, whether they know it or not. He writes: The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach dis-connections….Even in the best of schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions….Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working along with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess….In a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work…or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny. The second lesson I teach is class position….The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class….My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own.…If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes….That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place. The third lesson I teach is indifference….When the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch….Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference. The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command. The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency….It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives….[Only], the teacher can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think….Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm….Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it…Fortunately there are tested procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kids have respectable parents who come to their aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid’s school is one of the bad ones. No one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching. The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem….The lesson of report cards, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth. The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach students they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues….The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. -------------- Holistic Education Review - June 1992 Reviewed by Ron Miller John Taylor Gatto’s fiery speech to the New York legislature, upon being named the state teacher of the year, was reprinted in several publications and widely circulated among alternative and radical educators, making Gatto an immediate hero within the alternative education movement. That speech, along with four other essays are brought together in Dumbing Us Down, a book that should further establish Gatto as the most visible contemporary critic of public schooling. Like Paul Goodman, John Holt, Herb Kohl, Jim Herndon, and Jonathan Kozol in the 1960’s, Gatto is a morally sensitive and passionate teacher who is thoroughly disgusted by the spirit-crushing regimen of mass schooling, and unafraid to say so. Both Kohl and Kozol are still writing important books that present a progressive/radical critique of schools, but Gatto (like the late John Holt) gives voice to a growing populist rebellion against schooling as such. Whether this rebellion will support or counteract the holistic education movement is an open question to which Dumbing Us Down may offer some clues. One thing must be said up front: Gatto is a superb essayist. His writing is not academic or pedantic, but a model of harnessed passion. He builds his argument carefully and smoothly and then unleashes bold attacks that cut right to the core of many problems of modern education. He clearly has a solid understanding of the historical foundations of modern education, but generally makes his own personal interpretations rather than citing sources or scholars. Indeed, his essay, “The Green Monongahela” is an intimate account of his own life and how he became a teacher. He tells a simple story from early in his career, of rescuing a young Hispanic girl from the stupid injustice of the system (she later went on to become an award-winning teacher herself) that captures the essence of his moral crusade against institutional schooling. Gatto summarizes his argument in an introductory chapter: 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. (p. xii) In his speech to the legislature, he makes this charge explicit, describing seven “lessons” that form the heart of the compulsory curriculum. “These are the things you pay me to teach.”: Confusion. “Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything.” (p.2) Class position. “That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place. Indifference. “Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?’ (p.6) Emotional dependency. “By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command.” (p.7) Intellectual dependency. “Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers….Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity” (p.8). Gatto says this is “the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.” (p.8) Provisional self-esteem. “The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.” (p.11) One can’t hide. “Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers [such as Plato, Augustine, Calvin, Bacon, and Hobbes]. All these childless men…discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.” (pp.11-12) And here is the crux of Gatto’s critique: In the past 125 years, social engineers have sought to keep American life under tight central control. Compulsory schooling is a deliberate effort to establish intellectual, economic, and political conformity so that society can be managed efficiently by a technocratic elite. “School,” claims Gatto, “is an artifice that makes…a pyramidal social order seem inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution” (p. 15). Along with the media—especially television, which Gatto criticizes harshly in another essay—schooling removes young people from any genuine experience of community, any genuine engagement with the world of immersion in lasting relationships. It robs them of solitude and privacy. Yet these experiences are what enable us to develop self-knowledge and to grow up “fully human,” argues Gatto, and he asserts, that our most troubling social pathologies, such as drug abuse and violence, are the natural reaction of human lives subjected to mechanical, abstract discipline. Gatto insistently calls for a return to genuine family and community life by rejecting the social engineering of experts and institutions. In a particularly powerful passage, he rejects the notion that a “life-and-death international competition” threatens our national existence, as A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence, 1983) warned. Such a notion is “based on a definition of productivity and the good life” that is “alienated from common human reality.” True meaning is genuinely found, Gatto writes, in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals; in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built….(pp. 16-17) And these are the things we have lost in our hierarchically managed, global empire-building society. In the essay “We Need Less School, Not More,” Gatto draws a sharp distinction between true community (in which there is open communication and shared participation) and institutional networks (which value the individual only in terms of the institution’s particular goals). A network cannot be a healthy substitute for family or community, Gatto argues; it is mechanical, impersonal, and overly rational. Schooling is a prime example of this: If, for instance, an A average is accounted the central purpose of adolescent life—the requirements for which take most of the time and attention of the aspirant—and the worth of the individual is reckoned by victory or defeat in this abstract pursuit, then a social machine has been constructed which, by attaching purpose and meaning to essentially meaningless and fantastic behavior, will certainly dehumanize students, alienate them from their won human nature, and break the natural connection between them and their parents, to whom they would otherwise look for significant affirmations. (p.62) This is a brilliant, radical critique of the nature of modern schooling. ‘Gatto has certainly earned his heroic stature, with his deeply insightful observations into the very essence of what public education has become. His writings deserve to be pondered seriously by holistic teachers and can contribute a great deal of insight and energy to our work. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Freeman - February 1993 Reviewed by Hannah B. Lapp If John Taylor Gatto were introducing his book to us, he’s do us the favor of introducing himself first. In order to do justice to Mr. Gatto and his eye-opening book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, I must offer first of all a few words on the author himself. Mr. Gatto taught for 26 years in New York City public schools, a number of these years in Harlem and Spanish Harlem. But his “heart and habit,” he asserts, in his “Biographical Note,” are still in Monongahela, the small riverside town in Pennsylvania where he spent his early years. He describes the town as “an altogether wonderful place to grow up, even to grow up poor,” a place where “independence, toughness, and self-reliance were honored,” and where, he says he “learned to teach from being taught by everyone in town.” A year and a half ago, the public school system lost Mr. Gatto, and along with him it lost much of the smokescreen that had enabled it to remain so remarkably unchallenged over the years. Just after receiving the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year Award, Mr. Gatto announced he was going to quit because he didn’t want to “hurt” kids anymore. “Government schooling,” he charged, “kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.” The publishers of Dumbing Us Down call Gatto’s ideas about education “not easily pigeon-holed,” which is an accurate observation. Who else would stand up and tell us that schooling, as we know it, is not education, but a “twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned”? According to Gatto’s observations, the seven lessons taught in public schools from Harlem to Hollywood Hills, are these: Confusion (The natural order of real life is violated by heaping disconnected facts on students.) Class Position (Children are locked together into categories where the lesson is that “everyone has a proper place in the pyramid.”) Indifference (Inflexible school regimens deprive children of complete experiences.) Emotional dependency (Kids are taught to surrender their individuality to a “predestined chain of command.” Intellectual dependency (One of the biggest lessons schools teach is conformity rather than curiosity.) Provisional self-esteem (“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests, is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.”) One can’t hide (Schooling and homework assignments deny children privacy and free time in which to learn from parents, from exploration, or from community.) Just what is Gatto suggesting by his assaults on government schooling? Don’t children have to learn to read and do math? Clauses can be picked out of Dumbing Us Down to challenge the thinking of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and anyone in between. Truly Gatto’s theories are not readily pigeon-holed. Some are radical, if not downright subversive. That’s precisely why we find him so intriguing, and perhaps also why he’s booked for speaking engagements months ahead of time, and why we’re excited to hear he has another book forthcoming from Simon & Schuster [NOTE: The book referred to here is actually The Underground History Of American Education]. It’s as though we’ve been waiting too long for someone like Gatto to tell us there’s something wrong with the dependency on bureaucracy in modern American culture. Then too, he makes his point in such a straightforward, well-meaning way, that we aren’t easily offended even where we disagree. Gatto exhibits great confidence in the ability of human beings to educate themselves. But even if we agree that government schooling is the biggest impediment to this natural process, is it really the only problem? Why doesn’t a book as thought provoking as Dumbing Us Down address the other forms in which a centrally controlled society assaults the intellect of its members? For example, learning how to survive, to get along in life, is a basic part of any person’s education. In the modern American system, this process is sabotaged in welfare offices where people with material needs are taught that you don't have to earn the necessities of life, and in lawyers’ offices where people with problems getting along with each other are taught that litigation is the way to settle differences. These are just samples of the myriad impediments, many in the form of regulations, which are shoved into the path of self-education. And the age-segregated workplaces, along with lack of apprenticeship training, which Gatto rightfully deplores, are in my opinion as much the result of labor laws as is mandatory schooling. Perhaps Gatto intended to challenge us into making our own observations on these issues. Perhaps he also is right to imply that the root of such problems lies in government schooling. If people’s minds were not propagandized and controlled from youth up, they might indeed find paths independent of those “institutions and networks” which says Gatto, constantly compete “for the custody of children and older people, for monopolizing the time of everyone else in between.” He also contends that many of our modern society’s excesses, including the growth of commercial entertainment, such as television, the dependence on experts, and even parts of our economic structure (prepared-food industries, for example) would wither once people started truly thinking and acting for themselves. The thought of people doing more things for themselves is exciting, but I hope Gatto doesn’t mean to say that working for pay is always dependency. And although it’s true that most individuals would benefit from diversifying their skills, Gatto would have to admit that highly specialized professions also have their place a prosperous society. The best thing about Gatto is he doesn’t seek to impose his version of desirable education on anyone else. Neither can he be accused of being anti-civilization, and certainly not anti-education. He speaks admiringly of early America’s prosperity (and literacy) through individual initiative, and even offers ideas toward the revival of better schools and communities in our current day. As for solutions to the state of our educational system, Gatto at one point advocates a voucher, or school choice system, which would still be sadly deficient because of its dependence on government funds. His real thrust, though, comes out beautifully on page 79” “Break up these institutional schools, decertify teaching, let anyone who has a mind to teach bid for customers, privatize this whole business—trust the free market system. I know it’s easier to say than do, but what other choice do we have?” Sure, it’s a radical proposal, and Gatto doubtless has his enemies. However, there’s a part of every one of us that thrills to his appeal to unleash the infinite possibilities within the human mind. And most of us can’t help asking ourselves questions, such as, “Where did we ever get the idea that education means just the same thing to one person as it does to another?” Even more relevant: “How did we ever come to accept that any one group’s version of education should be forcibly imposed on every American child?” Reading Dumbing Us Down with an inquisitive mind is a whale of a learning experience, and it doesn’t take long to do. The book is only 120 pages, every one of them delightfully original. |
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