24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
Bravo, Mr. Gatto., January 16, 2009
By Matthew Kowalski (Saint Paul, MN) - See all my reviews
In this book, John Taylor Gatto rips the sheep's clothing off of the ravenous wolf that is government run schooling. The structure of schooling in America is shown to be an old Prussian model that is used to churn out consumers and dumb-down the general population. Read what the pioneers of modern schooling said in their own words...it's chilling.
One example - William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889-1906:
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual..." (from p. 13)
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51 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
Amazing book- A must read for anyone concerned for the future of our nation/, December 24, 2008
By Emily Winters - See all my reviews
I received this book yesterday afternoon. Christmas Eve day was spent reading this book, highlighting it, writing notes and reading aloud chunks of it to my home educated children.
And because it is Christmas Eve I will keep this review short. (Even though despite the holiday, I'd rather be calling all my friends and urging them to order this book; I am restraining myself however.)
This book is truly Gatto's Magnum opus; I like it better than any of his other books.
His sage observations on the school system, corporate world and consumer-driven culture are brilliant. He even addresses how this country has gone from manufacturing steel to manufacturing "Bubbles" (as in Real Estate bubbles...sound familiar?)
It is my earnest hope and prayer that students everywhere will accept the challenge of the Bartleby Project, which is offered on the last page of the book. Then maybe, just maybe, the dreadful course this country is hell-bent on can begin to change. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
Reclaim your mind - Read this book!!, December 31, 2008
By Andrea Mcclerren (Lopez,, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This book and Gatto's earlier work, "Dumbing Us Down", were life-changing reads for me and my wife.
We have been set free to live our own lives. We are going to let our children grow up with that freedom and take their own education. Largely due to this book I have decided to aggressively further my own education in order to live a truly fulfilling life and make a positive contribution to my country.
I discovered, as I hope you do, that MIT has made their entire undergrad/grad program online FREE-FOR-ALL. Just Google "MIT OPEN".
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Beyond Six Stars--a Manifesto for Liberty, September 5, 2009
By Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This book shocked me, and while I am not easily shocked, in shocking me made me realize how even my own radical outlook (as Howard Zinn notes, a radical is someone who no longer believes government is part of the solution) has come to accommodate, to accept, the most obvious tool of subordination, the public school system.
First, my fly-leaf notes, and then a couple of conclusions.
Constructive quote up front (xiv):
"We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness--curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight--simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then."
The author's bottom line: public schooling is a deliberate transplant from Germany that Carnegie and Rockefeller and Ford and other foundations designed as a deliberate means of dumbing down the mass population and segregating elite learning from mass "functional" learning devoid of political or philosophical reflection.
Early on the author suggests that public schooling opened the way for marketing American over-consumption by killing independent thinking and crafting group identities defined by the group and its "lifestyle" rather than the individual's own self-awareness.
Myself being a pioneer for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and now public intelligence and open everything, I was quite pleasantly surprised to discover that the author calls his vision of the correct approach "open source education."
He works hard to blend in an astonishing array of both critical observers and political or foundation/capitalist figures going back to the 1700's, which emphasis on the post Civil War era when the Northern schooling paradigm took hold, and the early 1900's when the top educators of America, funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller family fortunes, set out to destroy the roots of the American dream--the self-taught frontier mentality in which there were no children, only young people constantly in the process of learning from real-life and fulfilling adult roles as soon as their bodies were able.
Schooling is about obedience, not about learning. The author says "Mandatory education services children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants." (xxii).
Early on the author supports his radical critique by pointing out that literacy dropped with the spread of mandatory schooling, from 4% going into World War II to 19% going into Korea (a mere 10 years later) to 27% going into Viet-Nam.
Further on the author expresses the view that compulsory schooling set out to destroy self-reliance, ingenuity, courage, competence, and other frontier virtues, because they threatened management. He explicitly relates both the "scientific method" with social control, and takes pains to show how schooling is administrative control far removed from learning.
Across the entire book he catalogues with example and with gifted prose, the manner in which schools separate children from themselves, their families, and reality.
In describing schools as they should be, the author discusses the purpose of his guerrilla curriculum, to give his young adults time off to explore, to create "maps" as self-discovery tools and guides for others, and to unlock the hidden knowledge of the elderly.
He is virulently opposed to standardized testing that he says is a tool to segregate the population into five classes: gifted honors, gifted, special progress, mainstream, and special education. He points out that the latter category is the cash cow for schools, and that is one reason schools rush to "downgrade" students to that category.
He proposes that all parents and students refuse to take the standardized tests henceforth, and notes with appreciation the number of more enlightened colleges that now do not demand such scores. He goes on at length, with examples, to suggest that high test scores do not correlate with anything of significance.
He makes it clear that the greatest victim of this entire government-corporate-school bureaucracy cabal is the middle class student.
Gifted phrases abound in this book:
"fatal calculus in which real experience is subtracted from young lives."
"Incomplete men and women with a shaky grasp of the past and no capacity to visualize the future."
"Mass Testing institutionalizes dishonesty."
He is most admiring of the Amish model, and I draw many parallels between the health care and the educational systems in the USA, both being 50% waste, fraud, and abuse.
The author considers the federally-mandated, bureacraticized and largely ineffective school system to be both a religion--a form of state religion, the state ubber alles--and a crime in that all who maintain the system benefit from it financially, while destroying the minds and hearts of generation after generation.
Most telling to me, as a student of information asymmetries and data pathologies that concentrate wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, is the author's focus on schools as a form of "information deprivation." On pages 106-107:
"The social order to which he [Playfair] and Smithy belonged was held together by deliberately depriving most people of information they needed to maximize opportunities."
I put this book down feeling that it is incendiary in the most positive sense of the word, a form of creative destruction waiting to be implemented.
The book is very up to date with the current economic meltdown and the Goldman Sachs looting of the economy (who is in the White House matters not--Goldman Sachs going back to Rubin has owned the US Treasury, prints the money, assumes the debt "in our name," and generally commits treason in the guise of economic policy-making.
Below are a selection of books that I would recommend along with this one. See all of my Amazon reviews, with links to the Amazon page as well as to my buried reviews, at Phi Beta Iota.
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents (Paperback))
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
A Must Read, March 5, 2009
By Dan Atkinson (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
This is a must read for all Americans, with or without kids. This is not a book of wild conspiracy theories or speculation. It is a fact-based chronicle of our modern education system -- where it came from, and its intended purpose. Gatto makes a convincing case that this system touches and impacts all aspects of our society, culture, politics and economy, and that it stifles individualism and true happiness.
There are portions of the book that follow his previous work "An Underground History of American Education", a lengthy work of brilliance. But these portions are more condensed, and straight to the point. There is more urgency from the author this time. And there is palpable anger. Gatto's understandable disgust with government schooling, and the damage it does, is made obvious.
Anyone who would say "Oh c'mon, public school isn't THAT bad!" needs to read this book. Now. Even if you don't have kids, it will enlighten you. Now I understand who I am to a better degree. Being a product of the forced schooling machine, I can plainly see the lingering scars.
Get this book. I was surprised to find it a page-turner. Just try not to punch a hole in the wall as you read it! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Yes. The essential Gatto!, February 14, 2009
By Chris Davis "Chris" (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews
Unfortunately, many Americans are no longer willing to read a closely argued work like this one. It is their, and the nation's loss. Gatto gets personal and shares what he had to deal with in order to shepherd the young minds in his care. He also details what he did in the classroom that both earned him the title of New York Teacher of the Year and also earned him the contempt of his peers and administrators. As a homeschool dad who raised his three sons without "professional" help, I can say, with Gatto, "Just because everyone has to buy a ticket (pay school tax), doesn't mean he has to go to the game (send his kids to school)." I have come to believe that public schooling will eventually wreck this country unless some generation wakes up and refuses to go to the game. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Vitally important considerations for educated citizens, June 18, 2009
By Donald N. Anderson (Anchorage, Alaska) - See all my reviews
John Taylor Gatto has written another thought provoking book about the critical problem of allowing children to become educated. This one approaches the defects of current schooling from a number of directions that should leave no doubt about his reasons for objecting to compulsory schooling.
I was a public school teacher for only a couple of years in the early 60's teaching science and math in a small rural high school. I did not experience the vicious corruption of purpose in the way that John Taylor Gatto did in New York. Never the less, I formed the firm opinion that schools supported by government were a serious mistake in a free society and were dangerous to that society's long-term health. It is small wonder that many of our citizens value freedom so lightly that they appear willing to give it up for an illusion of security. After all, most have been bored and conditioned by 13 years of government schooling to accept authority even without reasons.
We need a full range of competing schools that offer the variety we find in fields such as food growing and delivery. We might also find that such schools carefully look for ways to deliver desired information more rapidly at lower cost. School costs have gone up at the same time quality has gone down. This is the picture of a failing institution, only government life support enables it to continue to miss-educate.
Gatto has done us all a huge service by providing a history of educational thought in America and identified its roots and personalities. You would be correct if you thought my education school classes failed to mention this part of history. After reading his earlier books, I went back and read more thoroughly the musings of John Dewey and others. It was a revelation and something I felt was not compatible with the American ideals of freedom.
I had always wondered why the classes in the education school were the worst classes in the entire college. After all, they should have learned something to become a professor of education. As teachers we always joked about how irrelevant those classes were to the actual work of a teacher. After reading Gatto, I suspect that those professors were selected because they were incapable of inspiring instruction and would fit well in the "dumbing down" process.
Even in my own public school education in the mid 40's, I was taught reading without phonics. They failed to suppress my interest in reading, but did delay my competence in spelling. The "dumbing down" process was evident at that time although it was just getting well started. I shudder to think of the many of our fellow citizens who have been unable to break free and perform their own critical evaluations. And they vote!
Private schools often mistakenly take leads from the public schools since the latter define the test content that all use to evaluate their standing. Mr. Gatto correctly identifies standardized testing as the first tool that needs to be destroyed to permit children to pursue an education rather than be schooled as obedient robots.
I can't completely agree with Gatto's recommendation that folks omit most schooling in favor of education. I personally converted from an avid history major to a chemistry major after I found as a college freshman that history instructors added only trivia to the faster knowledge acquisition skills I had already acquired through reading. However in chemistry, my skills were inferior and I definitely benefited from an instructor's guidance. This was not true of all classes, but there was enough of the challenging to keep me interested for many years.
I believe Mr. Gatto is entirely correct when he recommends homeschooling. The homeschooled students I have met were much better prepared and articulate than most of their contemporaries. They also fit well in the company of educated adults rather than participate in the resentments and conformity of perpetual childhood.
Every parent and taxpayer needs to read this book and develop his own position on schooling and education after incorporating the information that Gatto so vividly describes!
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
The Essential John Taylor Gatto Book, February 5, 2009
By A. M. Schmidt (Philly, PA) - See all my reviews
I only noticed this book because I shelve in a bookstore some days. I became acquainted with Gatto via his lecture series on Public Schooling. He maintains the listener's attention and interest in these speeches with an expansive knowledge and a willingness to improvise and otherwise disregard his script. These same attributes are extended to this latest book from him.
I will recommend this book heartily to anyone interested in a pithy, direct analysis of our schooling woes. The short answer to the educational problem is that public schooling is the fatal disease. The cure is to "knock it out, lock it in a room and set it on fire", to quote Gatto's own advice on the problem. He traces the twin origins of public schooling from intellectual elitism/racism, and the need of Northeastern industrial magnates for stupid, pliant workers. The rest of the story is stunning, even convoluted, and bears repeated reading.
In the end he does something that is quite unusual for him. He advocates a protest against public schooling by having us join in a refusal to participate in standardized testing, The Bartleby Project. I hope that many will take that call, read the book, and break the back of public education. We cannot afford to ignore this man; our children's future is at stake. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Another awesome book by Gatto, September 2, 2009
By Cory Dixon (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
I loved Gatto's first book "Dumbing Us Down". It changed the way I looked at the world. So, I had high expectations for this follow-up. I was not disappointed.
Gatto has an amazing way of taking a subject (compulsory schooling) that is shrouded by all kinds of patriotic and pyschobabble ideals and revealing it for what it is. Gatto is a breath of fresh air in the emotionally charged and tightly controlled world of forced education.
This book is a collection of letters and thoughts, much like his first book. It doesn't flow like a traditional book, but the ideas, experience, and information that is presented makes this book a page-turner.
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I recommend this book to everyone who was forced through the public education system or has a loved one that is subjected to it. It will give you a fresh perspective on the purpose school really serves. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A call to freedom in education, February 9, 2009
By J. Ball (Upstate NY) - See all my reviews
Unapologetic expose of the origins and condition of mass-forced public schooling in America. For a more in-depth study of this subject, be sure to check out his earlier work: The Underground History of American Education. It's about time someone called a spade a spade. Bravo Mr. Gatto, bravo!
