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The UNDERGROUND HISTORY of AMERICAN EDUCATION an Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

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The UNDERGROUND HISTORY of AMERICAN EDUCATION an Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling The UNDERGROUND HISTORY of AMERICAN EDUCATION An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling JOHN TAYLOR GATTO CONTENTS Foreword by Ron Paul, M.D. Introduction by David Ruenzel Te shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufcient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifes ofcial schooling frst had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real. Author’s Note PART ONE: Of Schooling, Education, And Myself Our ofcial assumptions about the nature of modern childhood THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his frst command. I was in ffth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up! ISBN 153362859 A Nation From Te Bottom Up You Had To Do It Yourself No Limit To Pain For Tose Who Allow It Te Art Of Driving Two Approaches To Discipline Te Schools Of Hellas Te Fresco At Herculaneum Te Seven Liberal Arts Te Platonic Ideal Oriental Pedagogy Counter-Attack On Democracy How Hindu Schooling Came To America (I) How Hindu Schooling Came To America (II) How Hindu Schooling Came To America (III) Braddock’s Defeat Farragut Ben Franklin Bootie Zimmer George Washington False Premises Montaigne’s Curriculum A System Of State Propaganda Te Ideology Of Te Text Te National Adult Literacy Survey Name Sounds, Not Tings Te secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way Te Meatgrinder Classroom children learn and it isn’t supposed to. It took seven years of reading Te Ignorant Schoolmaster and refection to fnally fgure out that mass schooling of the young Frank Had A Dog; His Name Was Spot by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth Te Pedagogy of Literacy century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Dick And Jane Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, “the control of human behavior.” I lived through the great transformation which turned schools A Change In Te Governing Mind from often useful places into laboratories of state experimentation Extending Childhood with the lives of children, a form of pornography masquerading as Te Geneticist’s Manifesto pedagogical science. All theories of child-rearing talk in averages, Participatory Democracy Put To Te Sword but the evidence of your own eyes and ears tells you that average Bad Character As A Management Tool men and women don’t really exist except as a statistical conceit. An Enclosure Movement For Children Wadleigh, Te Death School Te Dangan Dr. Caleb Gattegno, Expert Occasional Letter Number One Intimidation Change Agents Infltrate Hector Of Te Feeble-Mind Bionomics Hector Isn’t Te Problem Waking Up Angry One Lawyer Equals 3,000 Reams of Paper Te Great Transformation Education As A Helix Sport Something strange has been going on in government schools, I’m Outta Here! especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars, schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our universal reading profciency. Te School Edition Intellectual Espionage Looking Behind Appearances Te Sudbury Valley School Te Plan Advances Children’s Court Mr.Young’s Head Was Pounded To Jelly William Rainey Harper From start to fnish, school as we know it is a tale of true believers Death Dies and how they took the children to a land far away. All of us have Te Tree Most Popular Books a tiny element of true believer in our makeups. You have only No Place To Hide to refect on some of your own wild inner urges and the lunatic Te Irony Of Te Safety Lamp gleam that comes into your own eyes on those occasions to begin to understand what might happen if those impulses were made a permanent condition. An Open Letter for Oliver Stone and Michael Moore Munsterberg And His Disciples Backstory of Beatles’ Central Park Memorial “Strawberry Fields” Te Prototype Is A Schoolteacher Algorithms of Success Teachers College Maintains Te Planet Te Common Core Monster A Lofty, Somewhat Inhuman Vision A New Teory of Curriculum Rain Forest Algebra Te Original American Curriculum Godless, But Not Irreligious Te Curriculum of Play An Insider’s Insider Children Don’t Belong to Politicians—Court Decision Compulsion Schooling New York State Teacher Union (NYSTU) Assessment De-Moralizing School Procedure A Teenager Changes History William Torrey Harris Cardinal Principles Afterword by Richard Grove Te Unspeakable Chautauqua Presumably humane utopian interventions like compulsion schooling aren’t always the blessing they appear to be. For instance, Sir Humphrey Davy’s safety lamp saved thousands of coal miners from gruesome death, but it wasted many more lives than it rescued. Tat lamp alone allowed the coal industry to grow rapidly, exposing miners to mortal danger for which there is no protection. What Davy did for coal producers, forced schooling has done for the corporate economy. So Fervently Do We Believe Te Necessity Of Detachment Enlarging Te Nervous System Producing Artifcial Wants Te Parens Patriae Powers Tis book is a manifesto for home schooling families. Its message is clear: young children can learn the basics of literacy before they are teenagers: read- ing, writing, and arithmetic. Parents can teach these skills to their children. Once children have these basic skills, they are ready for serious reading and self-education. Te author argues that formal classroom education is a liability for students. It holds them back – not just bright students, but all students. His message to parents is this: “Your children can accomplish far more than the proponents of structured classroom education imagine.” Most parents believe this about their own children, but they lack evidence based on personal experience. Tis book ofers evidence from a master classroom teacher who left the system. Te amazing fact of this book is this: it is an underground history written by an “above-ground” educator. Te author is a former public school teacher. He won the Teacher of the Year award in New York City three years in a row: 1989, 1990, and 1991. He also won the Teacher of the Year for New York State (1991). Ten, in July of that year, he resigned. He did so in a spectacu- lar fashion: a letter to Te Wall Street Journal: “I Quit. I Tink.” He reprints it in the Author’s Prologue. He had submitted his open letter in March. He quit in July. Only then did the editors at the Journal publish his letter. At age 51, he was out of a job and had no career plans. Te publication of his letter launched his new career. He began to lecture around the country. He had left his job, but had not leave his calling: teaching. Now he teaches teachers. He has become a vocal advocate of home schooling. Tis book, which frst appeared in 2003, asks two related questions: “Who wins? Who loses?” Te author answers the second question clearly: students. His answer to the frst question is what makes this book unique: the business community. Tis informal alliance between business and public education began in the early nineteenth century, especially in the Northeast, where the new industrialism was beginning. Business managers wanted a steady supply of reliable, literate, cooperative, and uncomplaining employees. In the early years of the twentieth century, the politically dominant form of American business had become big business. Tere was a new faith in time-and-mo- tion studies of blue-collar workers. Tis was called “scientifc management.” Employees were supposed to get their training in the nation’s schools, with their hourly bells, their lock-step grade-level advancement programs, and 11 FOREWORD FOREWORD their committee-screened textbooks. He tells this story in Chapter 9. Ron Paul, M.D. Former Congressman At the same time that Frederic Taylor was spreading the gospel of scientifc Tree-Time Candidate for U.S. Presidency management, “progressive” education was being heralded by the intellectual elite as the basis of a new social order. Progressive education was not openly April 25, 2015 allied to big business, but it was in fact an extension of this outlook. Te movement’s most famous proponent was the philosopher John Dewey. Gat- to speaks of his frst year of teaching: 1961. Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special inter- ests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. Te masquerade is man- aged by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human afairs, but the net efect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and of in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efciency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling. Amazingly, according to Gatto, Dewey called this transformation “the new individualism.” Tere was nothing individualistic about it.
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