John Taylor Gatto
Speech
to the
Vermont
(Note: John Gatto is the former New
York State Teacher of the Year who renounced the government school
system in his landmark book DUMBING US DOWN. He is constantly in demand
as a public speaker.
As a bit of background, the industrial
titans of the 1890's began to think that not only could the production line be
engineered, but people's lives could be engineered as well, in order to work like
homogeneous robots with the machines. People like Rockefeller and Carnegie gave
huge sums to prominent academics to see if this could be realized through the
educational system. They found that to a considerable extent it could, and it
is still being done today as evidenced in Congressional Record during the
What I intend to talk to you about this
afternoon is what I understand you are aware of the positive goals and values
that you seek as homeschoolers. But I want to talk about the specifics of what
you're fleeing, because what you're fleeing is alive and well in the green
state of
A SHORT ANGRY HISTORY OF
AMERICAN FORCED SCHOOLING
Between 1967 and 1974 teacher training
in the
Three critical documents in this
transformation are Benjamin Bloom's multi-volume TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL
OBJECTIVES. That was the first. The second was a many-state project begun in
1967 called DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE, and it was set forth in an
enormous manual of nearly 1000 pages and finally the BEHAVIORAL TEACHER
EDUCATIONAL PROJECT which came in a manual of over 1000 pages. These were
inserted into every state education department in the country and moneys were
inserted there to pay faculty salaries a certain range of bribes for the school
districts that would pioneer the use of these things.
Let me start with the DESIGNING
EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE papers. They were the collusion with the federal
education department and the presumably independent state agencies. They
redefined education after the 19th century Germanic fashion as (quoting now
from the document) "as a means to achieve important economic and social
goals for the national character" and I would hasten to add that none of
those goals included the maximum development of your son or daughter. State
agencies would henceforth "act as Federal enforcers insuring compliance of
local schools with Federal directives". The document proclaimed that ( I'm
quoting again), "each state education department must be an agent of
change", proclaimed further "change must be institutionalized".
I doubt if an account of this appeared in any newspaper in the state of
The BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL
PROJECT outlines specific teaching reforms to be forced on the country,
unwillingly of course, after 1967. It also sets out, in clear language, the
outlook and intent of its invisible creators. Nothing less than quoting again
"the impersonal manipulation through schooling of a future America in
which few will be able to maintain control over their own opinions", an
America in which (quoting again) "each individual receives at birth, a
multipurpose identification number which enables employers and other
controllers to keep track of their [underlings]", (underlings is my interpretation,
everything else came out of the document), "and to expose them to the
directors subliminal influence of the state education department and the
federal department acting through those whenever necessary".
Readers learned in 1967, of course you
and I were not among those readers, that chemical experimentation on minors
would be normal procedure in the post 1967 world. That is a pointed
foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which would accompany the
student body of the future. Teachers were expected to function as government
change agents and their trainers, (this the first time reading this document
that I realized that the expression "teacher trainer", like animal
trainer, is an odd locution) the teacher trainers, were notified that
behavioral science would henceforth replace academic curriculum in schools. The
project identified the future as one (again I'm quoting) "in which a small
league would control all important matters, one in which participatory
democracy would largely disappear". Children would be made to see that
their classmates, and indeed the average man or woman were so inadequate, were
so irresponsible that they had to be controlled and regulated. The tremendous
rise in school violence and general chaos in the late 1960's, a period when
teachers and schools across the land were stripped of their ability to
discipline children, might be seen as a convenient public justification for
sharp constrictions of traditional liberty. Each outburst resonated through the
press like a billboard for emergency measures.
According to the BEHAVIORAL TEACHER
EDUCATIONAL PROJECT, post modern schooling would focus, (I quote directly from
the document), "on pleasure cultivation and interpersonal relationships
and other attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world". It makes
sense of course, doesn't it? That irresponsible semi-illiterate people could
not be trusted with much responsibility so in the new change agentry schooling,
which is called for by this national teacher training document, the teacher is
a therapist, translating the prescriptions of the social psychologists into
practical action research in the classroom.
The third critical gospel signaling a
great transformation at hand, to those in the know, was Bloom's TAXONOMY OF
EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES, which has, since its publication, spawned a number of
descendant forms, like "mastery learning", "outcome based
education" and "school to work"
business-government-economic projects. Dr. Bloom's compilation was a tool, (I'm
quoting from Dr. Bloom), "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to
act, think or feel as the result of participating in some unit of
instruction". I would be dubious if any parent in the
But why is all of this being done? One
large piece of the answer can be found in the current edition of FOREIGN
AFFAIRS MAGAZINE, which will be in all your libraries. It is surely one of the
most influential periodicals in the
His analysis makes further telling
points about the American worker and the American consumer. Like nowhere else,
he says "workers in
And finally, our endless consumption
completes the golden circle. Consumption driven, says Zukerman, by an
astonishing American addiction to novelty which provides American businesses
with the only domestic market in the world. Elsewhere in hard times, business
dries up here we continue to shop till we drop, mortgaging our futures to
keep the flow of goods and services coming. Remember this is not in any way a
critical article. There can be no doubt that the fantastic wealth of American
big business is a direct result of school training. Schools training a social
lump to be needy, frightened, envious, bored, talentless, and incomplete. The
successful mass-production economy demands such an audience. It isn't anybody's
fault. Just as the Amish small business, small farm economy requires
intelligence, competence, thoughtfulness and compassion, ours needs a well
managed mass level, anxious, spiritless families, godless and conforming;
people who believe that the difference between Coke and Pepsi is matter worth
arguing about. The American economy depends on schooling us that status is
purchased and others run our lives. We learn there that sources of joy and
accomplishment are external, that the contentment comes with the possessions,
seldom from within. School cuts our ability to concentrate to a few minutes
duration, creating a life-long craving for relief from boredom through outside
stimulation. In conjunction with television and computer games, which employ
the identical teaching methodology, these lessons are permanently inscribed. We
become fearful, stupid, voiceless and addicted to novelty.
The secret of American schooling is
that it doesn't teach the way children learn nor is it supposed to. Schools
were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and
families that is why it is compulsory. As a consequence, the school can not
help anybody grow up, because its prime directive is to retard maturity. It
does that by teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our
lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy even dangerous. School is the first
impression children get of society. Because first impressions are often the
decisive ones, school imprints kids with fear, suspicion of one another, and
certain addictions for life. It ambushes natural intuition, faith, and love of
adventure, wiping these out in favor of a gospel of rational procedure and
rational management.
About a month ago, the New York Times
sent a reporter to three daycare centers in
Behind the melodrama of lurid school
headlines, hammer attacks on pregnant school teachers, paramilitary assaults on
elementary schools by students whose cheeks have never felt a razor, pass the
red herring the falling or rising of S.A.T. scores. What seems clear to me
after 30 years inside the business, is that school is a place where children
learn to dislike each other. What causes that? The self hatred, ineptitude, and
generalized antagonism are certainly the justification for a managed society
that deviates from the founding documents of this nation, which conferred
sovereignty on ordinary people, not on experts.
The U.C.L.A. study done recently of a
1000 public schools found that the teachers" averaged 7 minutes daily in
personal exchanges with students. Divided among 30 kids, that is a total of 14
seconds each. The constant scrambling for attention and status in the close
confines of the classroom., where those are only officially conferred by an
adult who lacks both the time or the information (to be fair), teaches us to
dislike and distrust each other. This continuous auction of favors, has
something to do with our anger, and our inability to be honest or responsible,
even as grown-ups. Yet, ironically, irresponsibility serves the management
ideal much better than decent behavior ever could. It demands close management,
it explains all those lawyers, all those courts, all those policemen and all
those schools. Now either we are structurally undependable, necessitating
constant policing, or somehow we have been robbed of our ability to become
responsible.
Consider the strange possibility that
we have been deliberately taught to be irresponsible and to dislike each other
for some good purpose. I am not being sarcastic or even cynical. I spent 19
years as a student, and 30 more as a school teacher and in all that time I was
seldom asked to be responsible, unless you mistake obedience and responsibility
for the same thing, which they certainly are not. Whether student or teacher, I
gave reflective obedience to strangers for 49 years. If that isn't a recipe for
irresponsibility then nothing is. In school your payoff comes from giving up
your personal responsibility, just doing what you're told by strangers even if
that violates the core principles of your household. There isn't any way to
grow up in school, school won't let you. As I watched it happen, it takes three
years to break a kid, 3 years confined to an environment of emotional
neediness, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games, these work much
better than angry words and punishment. Constant supplication for attention
creates a chemistry whose products are the characteristics of modern school
children whining, treachery, dishonesty, malice, cruelty and similar traits.
Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of the classroom,
I have never seen this dynamic examined in the public press not in 50 years
of reading the public press. Ceaseless competition for attention in the
dramatic fishbowl of the classroom, reliably delivers cowardly children,
toadies, school stoolies, little people sunk into chronic boredom, little
people with no apparent purpose, just like caged rats, pressing a bar for
sustenance, who develop eccentric mannerisms on a periodic reinforcement
schedule. Those of you who took rat psychology in college will know what
I'm referring to just like the experience of rat psychology, the bizarre
behavior kids display is a function of the reinforcement schedule in the
confinement of schooling to a large degree. I'm certain of that. Children like
this need extensive management.
Suppose that producing incomplete
beings is the purpose of modern schooling. Further suppose, there is a rational
defense for doing it, Suppose a century ago, far sighted men and women,
although they were largely men, saw that to realize the potential in machinery
and fossil fuel, that the bulk of the population would have to be dumbed down
and made dependent not to hurt people but because only in this fashion
could a population of producers, which surely characterizes the American scene
then, be turned into the consumers required by a commercially intense economy.
That the labor force could be made sufficiently adaptable to endure modern
machinery which must rapidly evolve for ever and ever. This specific
engineering problem confronted this key group of business people and
philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century. How could a proud
liberty-loving nation of independent families and villages be turned from its
historic tradition of self-reliance and independence? Grown ups were unlikely
to be tractable. The history, the highly personalized practice of local
schooling, offered another possibility. Social thinkers have speculated for
millennia, that a political state which successfully seizes control of the
young could perform economic miracles. That idea is at least 2300 years old.
And while the only instrument adequate for such a project, forced schooling,
had never been more than a freak in the western world, it had been successful
in one place, the military-theocracy of Prussia and the Germanies. Horace
Mann's pilgrimage to
At the beginning of the 20th century,
the power to determine what education meant was vested in the managers of the
new forced school institution. It was exactly as if in winter an Eskimo gave
over meat to a polar bear for safekeeping. "Here you big bear, watch this
seal meat until I get back". In the first decades of the new school
century the group of famous academics symbolically led by Edward Thorndike (he
is the Thorndike of the Thorndike/Barnard dictionary), and John Dewey of
Columbia's Teacher's College and their industrialist allies, decided to bend
government schooling to business and the political state just exactly as it
been bent in Prussia. A higher mission would exist too. Schools would serve as
"instruments of managed evolution, establishing conditions for selective
breeding before the masses take things into their own hands" (now I quoted
that from a published essay by Edward Thorndike at Columbia Teacher's college
in 1911). Standardized testing would separate those fit to breed and those fit
to work and those unfit. Back before WW1, educational psychology, which was the
creation of Edward Thorndike, had established that certain kinds of mental
training in history, in philosophy, in rhetoric, for instance, made students
resistant to manipulation because it developed independent intellect, it
reduced their plasticity. That knowledge coupled with the new German directive
to serve corporation and government, provided a sufficient motive to dumb
instruction down.
Between 1906 and 1920, a handful of
world famous industrialists and financiers, together with their private
foundations, hand picked University administrators and house politicians, and
spent more attention and more money toward forced schooling than the national
government did. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller alone spent more money
than the government did between 1900 and 1920. In this fashion, the system of
modern schooling was constructed outside the public eye and outside the
public's representatives. Now I want you to listen to a direct quote, I have
not altered a word of this, it's certainly traceable through your local
librarians. From the very first report issued by John D. Rockefeller's General
Education Board this is their first mission statement: "In our dreams,
people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present
education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their
minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and
responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children
into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise
up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists,
painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, (he's really covering the whole
gamut of employment isn't he?) statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we
have ample supply (whoever the pronoun we is meant to stand for there). The
task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in an perfect way the
things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way".
Now you might say that is quoting out
of context and I would speculate what the context of such a statement could
possibly be, but in any case, if you want to get the whole thing, that's
OCCASIONAL LETTER NO.1. OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD, which I told you was
spending more money than the Federal Government on education of the first two
decades of this century.
The real purpose of modern schooling
was announced by the legendary sociologist Edward Roth in his manifesto of 1906
called SOCIAL CONTROL. Your librarian will easily be able to get a copy of this
book. In it Roth wrote, (I am quoting) "plans are underway to replace
family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media and education (of course
he meant schooling)...people are only little plastic lumps of dough".
Another insider, H. H. Cadard, chairman for the Psychology Department at
The first curriculum was dumbed down,
then national testing was inserted, next morality was weakened and finally
between 1970 and 1974, teacher training in the
Using schools as the principal forge,
the building blocks for a self-perpetuating ruling dynasty, organized on
scientific principles, moved into place during the first 5 decades of the 20th
century. Obstacles like religion, tradition, family, the natural rights
guaranteed by our founding documents were steadily beaten back. Schools slowly
became, after WW1, a huge reconstruction project conducted with the enthusiasm
of an evangelical religion. The traditional God was banished entirely before
1950 to be replaced by psychological missionaries in a social-work priesthood.
Public school was transmuted into a social laboratory without public knowledge
or public consent. Think of what happened as a second American Revolution,
striking down those perverse founding documents which granted sovereignty to
ordinary people.
School was a lie from the beginning and
continues to be a lie. You hear a great deal of nonsense these days about the
need of a high tech economy for a well educated people, but the truth staring
you in the face is that it requires no such thing. As our economy is
rationalized into automaticity, and globalization, it becomes more and more an
interlocking set of subsystems coordinated centrally by mathematical formulae
which simply can not accommodate different ways of thinking and knowing. Our
profitable system demands radically incomplete customers and workers to make it
go. Educated people are its enemies, so is any nonpragmatic morality.
To get better schools that actually
served us instead of suffocating us, we would need to successfully challenge
certain scholastic and corporate assumptions. We would need to abandon,
entirely, the idea that any such reality as mass-man actually exists. We would
have to believe what fingerprints and intuition tell us that no two people
are alike, that nobody can be accurately described by numbers, that trying to
do this sets up a future chain of griefs. We would have to accept that there is
no such thing as a science of pedagogy, nor is one possible that each
individual has a private destiny. We would need to transfer faith to such
principles and behave as if it were true. We would have to come to our senses
and admit that knowledge is not a substitute for wisdom. We would have to
believe each American has the right to live as he or she deems wise providing
only they do no harm to others. And if the way individuals chose to live means
disaster for global corporations, as the Amish way of life embraced by too many
would surely mean disaster, the fateful choice would still have to be honored
because it is protected by the only contract that defines us our founding
documents and natural law. The brilliant dialectical balance struck by our
founders was a way to keep power weak and off-balance. The official power and
popular power both. Popular will would check government tyranny. Government
would check popular tyranny over minority rights. This constant confrontation,
this un-winnable war between two permanently flawed collectivizing principles,
coercive government and bullying public opinion, produces liberty for those who
want it. In the stalemate liberty escapes.
Lately what has happened is this: in an
effort to avoid the damnable arguments of the people and to become more
efficient, management has wrecked the political balance. It has made us all
prisoners of management systems. School is it's vital ally. What we have built,
mass forced schooling, cannot be reformed, it must be bashed. It was created by
people, people can take it apart.
Thank you very much. (Applause)...
Question and Answer Period
(more
good information)
Q. "I've heard recently that not
only is the question of STUDENTS' compliance a requirement in these schools,
but now there is a lot of concern about non-conforming parents who are too
interested in the education of their children. So someone just told me about
the existence of an enemies list in
A. Yes, there is one in here in
Q. ...and I was just going to ask you
to address the possible uses of that enemies list.
A. The
The Delphi technique works like
this; you have a gripe with a school in
I was the representative of
The design of the project appears
between 1890 and 1910. It's simply that a group of people (and let me be just
to them: they absolutely believed that they were working in the interests of
everyone) set out to create a command economy and a command society. They
worked through the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, Russell Sage and no more than 8 other foundations. They work
through about 20 universities, in this part of the world, Yale was and is the
big one but still with John Hopkins, Harvard to some extent, the University of
Chicago in the middle of the country, Stanford on the west coast. They were
also coordinated to certain corporations, not all the Fortune 500, but about 30
of the corporations , Colgate being in the central group, Procter and Gamble in
the central group, we could spend a week, but the truth is with thousands of
people trying to solve this problem with why schooling has turned so bad, that
digging a fact here and a fact there and a part of a book here, that the
picture is very, very clear now:
It wasn't until the end of the Second
World War that the thing got full speed. During the Second World War, the
American ability to read, which was astonishing, unbelievable and unprecedented
in world history was substantially deconstructed in the schools. If you look at
the figures, not from the state education department test, but from the Army
general classification scores, the difference between
[Some other day] we'll have enough time
to sit down together over a pot of ice tea or whatever passes for a pause up
here in
Q. What can a person do within the
present school system?
A. You can act, and some rural
communities do, but not very many. You can individually act as a kind of a
saboteur as long as you aren't overly public about what you are doing sure an
individual school teacher or an individual principal although very rare on
the principal level because 20 people are waiting for those jobs, and the
slightest deviation in administering instructions that seem to come from the
state, (Vermon.), they never do they either come from Washington or the
Carnegie Foundation or a number of think tanks so the slightest deviation is
easy to log back at headquarters and then somehow or other a new school board
says, " this incompetent principal or this superintendent has to
move". The superintendents in the
Q. I wonder if it would be possible to
give us some information about the genesis of the NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION
AND THE ECONOMY.
A. Mark Tucker's outfit. You've
heard me make a glancing reference here to the experiments in
Anyway, the
When Mr. Clinton was elected, an
eighteen-page private internal letter went out. Someone put it on the internet,
but the office that generated the letter did not deny it. Was it you?...
Listen, I'd like to shake your hand. (Applause)
(note: The 18 page letter is at http://www.sover.net/~nbrook/
Over two years ago, a copy of a letter to Hillary Clinton from Marc Tucker of
the
Everywhere I go in the country people
say that some benefactor put this out on the internet. An 18 page letter really
specifying a certain time table, a window that would be open for a while. You
would have to move very fast to get this thing underway. Meanwhile David
Rockefeller, at the U.N., not before the general assembly, but before project
heads, was saying that the window is now wide open but it's not going to stay
open forever. What this gentleman is referring to is the surfacing of the tip
of an iceberg. In an undeniable fashion .utterly documented and not denied by
the author of the project who is quite active right now.
I do think though that the forward
thrust has been blunted somewhat. I have been in all 50 states and 7 foreign
countries and I talk about the 50 states: there are groups everywhere. There
were 500 in
What they're trying to do now in
(Note: THE SEDUCTION OF HOMESCHOOLING
FAMILIES by Chris
it's a very careful analysis of the
strategy of bribing parents and the local communities to surrender, to come
back under the umbrella so it doesn't appear that there is a conflict under
way. In
Q. I wrote a letter, a long
letter to my school about being much more involved with the training of my boys
as a parent, and I feel after listening to you, that it is just this white blob,
it's a big blob, and I'm crushed under it.
A. No, no it's a big blob but I used
to know some structural engineering it has a tremendous weight that can
sit on you and squash you but it doesn't have much internal cohesion. The
people who operate this aren't of one mind. They hate each other. They're
scrambling for your dollars. There are a few ideologues around like Art Tucker
and they're genuinely dangerous people. But most of the people do this because
it's an easy buck. Or it's an easy minor status in the community. And then
they'll cut each other's throat. The reason I survived for 30 years as a
guerilla in the New York school system, which is the worst of all in the
country, is simply that I discovered that I could set one assistant principal against
another, or a principal against a superintendent because he wanted to be the
next superintendent, he knew that these guys only lasted a short time. Or I
could set
But what I discovered with all these
layers of authority that really are there, that parents are unaware of: they
don't like each other very much. They're after the same pile of money with
the exception of people like Tucker who are after change agentry and changing
the nature of our government, the nature of our society. But most of them
aren't that way just venal people, the kind of people you run into every day
and they're capable, some of them, of changing their mind.
Look at what happened with the two
great new wave psychologists, Carl Rodgers and Dave Maslow, who were used
really as the religious text for psychologizing a classroom for years. At the
end of both of those men's lives, they repudiated their life's work. Now I
notice that the book in which they repudiated them, the new edition doesn't
contain the essay in which they did that. However Rodgers' first assistant, a
fellow named Colson, is traveling the country the same way I am, telling the
truth about what they did and about what Rodgers' and Maslow's final
determination on their life's work was. He was a trusted assistant and rightly
so. He is an honorable man. So I see a lot of room for optimism. Isn't the fact
that a group of home schoolers who numbered maybe 12,000 twenty years ago is
now at least a million and a half, my hunch is more than that isn't that
some measure of how unstoppable the truth really is?
I mean every administrators' meeting I
go to and get to sit around, homeschooling is on everybody's agenda. How can we
get these people? How do they do this under our noses? Of course you didn't do
this under their noses, what you did is what was right to do, what was fun to
do, what worked.
Oh boy... sometimes I say this to
people, " I don't understand how do you wake up in the morning. I wake up
in the morning when it's dark, I walk the dog, if I forget to kiss my wife,
she'll hit me over the head...and of all the wonderful human things to: do, to
sit around scheming to steal the nation from its people, why? What is the point
of this?", well anyway, anyway, I ramble on....
Well I'm certainly going to tell the
folks in
Well, thank you, thank you very much,
thanks for being here.
This transcript has not been edited by
John Gatto. Corrections appreciated. -RW
Choice
Comment
In 1983, A
Nation At Risk urgently recommended reforms in education warning
"the
Business increasingly looks for talent
overseas. The world's greatest concentration of PhD's is in
One does not need to scurry around
trying to devise a plan to extricate ourselves from this mess. The simplest way
to improve American education (public, private, and parochial) quickly is to
adopt books and teaching methods from countries at the top of the ranking.
Several International
Baccalaureate schools have gotten dual accreditation from their
participating sister country when they met the higher standards required
abroad.
In one case, that required an extra
hour of instruction each day, and phys-ed in a foreign language (what a
concept!). A successful government school nicknamed "teacher heaven"
was organized by principal Lois Lindahl in