CBC News Indepth: Education

01:29 PM EDT May 27

INDEPTH: EDUCATION
Education, not schooling: An interview with John Taylor Gatto

Owen Wood, CBC News Online | March 2002

Photo courtesy of John Taylor Gatto

"An education largely comes from inside out. No one gives you one. You make one. Schooling is just the reverse."
– John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto says schools are "incubators of disease." He says they are hideous, horrible places that destroy the mentality and the character of students, leaving them crippled and incomplete.

He's not anti-education, he's anti-school.

Gatto taught in the public schools of Manhattan for 30 years. He was named New York state teacher of the year, and New York City teacher of the year three times. He has written four books on education and has spent the last decade travelling across the United States, Canada and other countries to speak about education reform.

In his first book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, Gatto outlines why schools are bad for our kids. He says schools teach confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, and provisional self-esteem.

Schools, he argues, do not teach children to think for themselves. They don't permit students to mix with older people, from whom they could learn so much. In schools, children are under constant surveillance and they are not taught to become self-educators. "The truth," he writes, "is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders."

A 10th-anniversary edition of Dumbing Us Down came out in April 2002. You can also read Gatto's latest book, The Underground History Of American Education, on his Web site: www.johntaylorgatto.com

In Dumbing Us Down you write, "It's time to stop. This system doesn't work, and it's one of the causes of our world coming apart. No amount of tinkering will make the school machine work to produce educated people; education and schooling are, as we all have experienced, mutually exclusive terms." You wrote this more than 10 years ago. Do you still feel this way today?

Much more so now. Since I wrote that I've travelled a million-and-a-half miles in 50 states and eight foreign countries and I've come to the conclusion that the trap is built in to the very label we put on the thing.

People can tolerate a small amount of schooling. They can't tolerate 12 years where they're locked up and schooled for that period of time. It has an immensely destructive effect. The people who survive best are the people who have families or neighbourhoods, which in fact allow the process of education to take place.

An education largely comes from inside out. No one gives you one. You make one. People can help you along the way, but they can't order one for you. Schooling is just the reverse.

What's the difference between schooling and education?

There's an immense difference. (In the schooling system) no one is asked to show any initiative at all either in Canada or the United States or Germany or France. What they're asked to do is to display a sufficient degree of obedience. That includes obedience to the stupidest rules or the stupidest formulations of ideas. If you show an acceptable degree of obedience, you're graded as Grade A for a machine society.

"Standardized tests... don't measure a God damn thing except the conformity of the student."

I don't deny that some portion of schooling has a value. It's way out of control at this point where people are ranked from first to 50-millionth on standardized tests that don't measure a God damn thing except the conformity of the student. They do not separate the good readers from the mediocre readers from the bad readers. They don't deliver what they claim to deliver. It makes me furious.

I would be happy to offer this challenge. I would fly into any Canadian city, and the city could provide me with the 20 best readers in the city, and I would give them an open-book test on an extremely simple book, a classic World War One novel called All Quiet on the Western Front, and all of them would fail. I would be surprised if any of them got one question right, but none of them would pass in any case.

I know because I tried that on the elite of Manhattan for 10 years in a row and not a single kid passed. How did I know they weren't going to pass the reading test? Because I avoided the type of questions that are asked on standardized tests. And I knew that the better the student, the more certain it was that he or she would have screened out any information that didn't look like it might be a question on a standardized test.

Because they are taught what as opposed to what?

There are about 150 different kinds of information in a reading section. The standardized tests selectively focus on six or seven of those, over and over again. All you need do is to ask a question outside the very narrow orbit of the sculpting of standardized tests and I guarantee you, even if the information is in front of the, quote, "good reader," they won't see it. The better the reader, in fact, the more certain you are that they won't see it because they've refined their efficiency in reading to exclude anything that won't be a standardized test score.

What are Canadian government schools about? What do they aim to do? The number one job in Canada is retail salesperson. The number two job is cashier. The number three job is office clerk. The number four job is truck driver. Would Canadian schools attempt to raise people to the level where they would look down on those jobs? I hardly think so, do you?

What would be said in defence is people distribute themselves on a bell curve and so some people can't do more than be a retail salesperson, it's biologically predetermined. Well that is the airiest horseshit. I taught for 30 years in inner-city schools and I will absolutely guarantee you that right off the bat there is a selection of those kids who are as sharp or sharper than the elite kids in the so-called gifted and talented programs. They're not being educated. (But) they're being schooled to be specialists in the official economy.

Your children in Canada are being raised to fit into the predetermined economy and so are American kids. There are some exceptions to that. The kids who go to elite private boarding schools are not being raised to fit. They're being raised to make policy decisions, to take command.

"What the top boarding schools teach doesn't cost a penny. The big shibboleth to get out of the way is that this costs any money or requires much training. It's pathetically easy to teach these things."

There are 20 top elite boarding schools in the United States. They graduate perhaps 1,000 people per year. In the presidential election of 2000, George W. Bush went to one of those schools – Andover. Al Gore went to one of those schools – St. Alban's. John McCain went to one of those schools – Episcopal. Steve Forbes went to one of those schools – Brooks. What is the statistical probability that, all other things being equal, four of the six finalists for the American presidency, and the eventual winner, would have gone to schools that only graduate 1,000 people a year out of the five or six million who are graduated?

But not everybody can afford to send their kids to private schools...

What the top boarding schools teach doesn't cost a penny. It isn't in laboratory equipment. That's for the morons in the upper-middle class to think. An education is absolutely free. The qualities that schools that attempt to provide an education aim for don't cost anything at all. They're not dependent on equipment and they're only modestly dependent on teaching personnel.

I have a list here, because I'm writing an article about it, of the qualities aimed for in the top 20 elite private boarding schools:

Strong competency in the active literacies

Let me just give you a few other things that the top boarding schools stress that cost nothing at all to do except the will to do it for kids:

Repeated exercises in the forms of good manners

A disciplined and trained mind

A complete theory of access to any workplace, any institution, any environment or any person

It's pathetically easy to teach these things. Anyone who starts with this template can in short order, painlessly and with no money at all, draw kids on to a road to an education. And the kids will be wildly enthusiastic because, like people who have had a drink of water when they're thirsty, they know that they feel better. And people whose minds and characters are developed know they feel better.

The big shibboleth to get out of the way is that this costs any money or requires much training. It's childishly simple to do.

In Dumbing Us Down, one of the aspects of the education system you criticize is grading – the act of using letter grades or percentages to measure a student's progress. What is wrong with grading?

Nobody ever gets hired anywhere, except for government jobs, by asking to see their grades. What do you ask for? You ask for a track record or for some performance test. So why aren't schools set up that way?

They're not set up that way because it would upset the social and economic apple cart to have people actually compete on the basis of merit.

You and I, and millions of others like us, have a gentlemen's agreement not ever to mention these things because there's nothing we can do about it, we think. Blinders have been conditioned on to virtually all of us so that we police ourselves.

If you read John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, the fourth edition, written back in the 1530s I believe, Calvin says there are too many of the damned to police. They outweigh the saved. What we have to do is teach them how to police each other so that we can keep them from putting a drag on our own projects.

Here we are five centuries later and that's what Canadian schools do. That's what American schools do.

How do you measure a student if not with grading?

How do you know somebody can write? I say write something and then you say, "Look, you're a moron. This is illiterate." That's how you do it.

How do you know someone can add or subtract? You ask them to do it. I'll tell you this, the kids who can't pass your simple arithmetic tests never come home with the wrong change. They'd be beaten to death if they did. They add and subtract just fine when it counts. Nobody wants to deal with those interesting contradictions.

I had to put kids in thumbscrews when they would bring me work that was second or third rate. I would say, "Who the hell are you trying to kid? You copied this out of a book, you brainless moron. Go back and do your own work and don't bring it to me until it's of a standard that I won't be ashamed of you for."

Does that work? Beautifully. Splendidly.

One of your beliefs is that education should involve sending kids into their community to experience the real world. When you were a teacher you used to send kids off on personal field trips to follow around a police chief for a day or apprentice with a newspaper editor or one of a hundred other ideas. But how did you send your kids out of the school on their own when you, as a teacher, are responsible for their safety?

I always made sure I had the parents' permission. Let's put it this way: I'm not a flagrantly careless person but I really am not Johnny-on-the-spot about details. I did this, illegally, for 20 years, so it probably affected 2,500 kids. And I sent them not only out of the school building, sometimes I sent them out of the state. They were 12 and 13 years old. Some of them were elite kids, most were not. I never once, not once in 20 years, had an incident. Does that tell you something about the common sense concerns of the school institution?

"None of the school reform groups have any intention of changing the product of schooling."

Kids don't put themselves in harm's way when they're doing something they want to do. They're quite cautious. The most dangerous place, in both our societies, is inside a school that locks its fire door to make sure kids don't sneak out and they don't have to pay for a guard to watch the fire door.

(Schools) are the incubators of disease in both our cultures. They destroy the mentality and the character of almost all the people who pass through them. We are left crippled and incomplete. We're less than we would have been in this kind of a system.

None of the school reform groups have any intention of changing the product of schooling. What they do want to change is the public criticism, which is uneasy. It's a condition that might provide instability in the future.

I'm 67 years old and I'm appalled. I've spent most of my life, as a boy, a young man and a man, inside of schools. They're hideous, horrible places and the people who say, "Well, I'm too busy to provide something different for my kids or I'm too polite to stand in the street and throw mud," ought to be ashamed of themselves.

You often mention how it's possible to teach kids how to read, write and do arithmetic in less than 100 hours. How is this done?

With the reading it's fairly common. Thirty hours is what it takes to teach somebody to read well enough that they can pretty much pick up their teaching and continue it on their own. The whole math curriculum inside of 50 hours came to me from a physics teacher who runs a private day school, called the Sudbury Valley School. He said, "Our kids at Sudbury go through the whole math curriculum, through calculus and trig, in 50 hours."

I once had a very famous structural engineer named Mario Salvadori, (who) was the world's foremost earthquake engineer, teaching me calculus, and he said, "John, I could teach you the entire calculus in three hours. It's that simple," he said. "But you've been so conditioned to believe that you could barely learn it at all if you studied around the clock, that it would take you three years if you could learn it at all." I don't think he was exercising hyperbole.

You have a lot to say about how the schooling system should be reformed. If one teacher wanted to change one thing either about what he was teaching or how he was teaching, what do you think would be most important?

I think the most important thing is to know who you're teaching. And you cannot know who you're teaching by reading the school records or by spending the minute or two that's available to you in the classroom.

I would urge anybody who's going to make their living in school teaching to see to it that they visit the homes of every single kid they teach. Make appointments ahead of time. Hold an after school coffee session. I did it once a week, no less than once every two weeks. Have as many parents as want to come in and sit around and kick ideas back and forth together.

I would say to school teachers: do not be an agent of the political state. Do not be because if you are, no matter how sweet your smile or how bright your ideas, the real kids will not trust you and neither will their parents.

Work for those kids and first find out who they are, and what they want, and what their family traditions are. Walk through their neighbourhoods. Talk to them like people. And you'll find that you've inherited, without you knowing it, a tremendous engine of information and intellection and heart.

For more about John Taylor Gatto, including his latest book The Underground History Of American Education, go to his Web site: www.johntaylorgatto.com

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