So many of the world’s billionaires and other great achievers, past and present, never graduated from high school, or never even went to school at all, that one begins to wonder if there’s a pattern here. Could removing your children from public school entirely be a key to their future success?
John Taylor Gatto was a public school teacher in New York City. Named the city’s Teacher of the Year three times in a row, and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, he must have been doing something right. In the prologue to his book, The Underground History of American Education, he details some of the ways that the administration tried to get rid of him for being, well, a good teacher. The same year he was named the state’s Teacher of the Year, he resigned by writing a letter to theWall Street Journal in which he said he did not want to “hurt kids to make a living.”
And if you haven’t read it, that book is well worth a read. It tells where modern public schools came from and how and why they were established in the United States, the one place in the world where, at the time, the people would have been vehemently opposed to such a thing. (And they were.)
Gatto spoke at the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum on another possible way that children might receive an education, which he calls “open source education.” His speech was drawn from a part of his new book, Weapons of Mass Instruction. In this book Gatto presents solutions to the problem of public education.
Gatto traces the history of the idea of forced public schooling all the way back to Plato, shows its connections to racism, and illustrates that the purpose of public schooling is to confuse the vast majority of people, destroy their imaginations, and make them easier for the rulers of the day to manage.
This remains the primary purpose of public schools to this day.
One possible solution is what he calls open source learning, which he illustrates with several examples.
It’s clear that public schools are a disaster and wholly destructive to a free, independent civilization. Sending a child there is a sentence worse than death, as it destroys the very soul. As we’ve seen, this is by design. Regardless of solution, it’s clear that if you want your children to have an education, the last place you would send them is a public school.
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Your damn right!!
Apr 02, 2009
Put your kids in homeschool. Schools were designed to bring kids down so, all they can get are low paying half ass jobs at Mc. Donalds or ect.. The schools want to keep them dumb. In the words of Pink Floyd” Hey teacher leave them kids alone!! We don’t need no thought control!! No Dr. has em in the classroom. The ones that have brains are told they are nuts because, they want to keep everyone one down to use and abuse. Those scum bag shits!! The schools suck. They are even using them to try to steal kids from parents by causing bullshit trouble so, they can put them in foster care and use that money for themselves. This is really a big scam in these crappy economic times. They don’t give the foster kids shit and crappy food. They make them wear crappy clothes and moldy shoes. ECt.. They suck!! Stand up America, how do you think we got in this crappy economic mess? They keep crapping allover us. No one can stimulate the economy with minimum wage that they set us up to make. Scum Dogs!!
openworld
Apr 03, 2009
Next, I hope — students becoming vested as co-owners of for-profit virtual or actual schools. Initial ideas on this and related opportunities such microvouchers for online learning are at www.entrepreneurialshools.com.
Kitsune(kit-soon-ae)
Apr 04, 2009
I’ve been to both public and private schools as well as been schooled at home. Out of those 3 options, Homeschool was the least hellish. I plan to homeschool my kids whether or not it’s still legal.
Kitsune-sama
Apr 04, 2009
Hmmm…
Just read comment 1, and was wondering if it was written by that crazy “Pigs” guy. Is it?
Maria
Apr 22, 2009
Gatto is my hero. I love him. He changed my whole paradigm.
psikeyhackr
Apr 30, 2009
Now NETBOOKS are arriving in the US for $300 to $500. This is cheap enough to give to grade school kids. I noticed there weren’t any American educators screaming for OLPCs for American kids. What IRONY!
So how can we get kids to self-educate via cheap computers and the internet and let the school systems go hang?
They want $100 or more per book for some college courses. So books for 4 courses would pay for a netbook. Maybe the books are $20 in grade school.
But another factor with electronic books is that they don’t wear out and they can be upgraded a chapter or even a paragraph at a time. No need to buy new books. This ultimately presents a problem for the text book publishing business.
But I was really thinking about parents getting them for kids as a supplement to regular school or for home schooling. I think the computer revolution has not really hit yet in terms of what it can do for human knowledge. The companies just want everybody to upgrade every other year. Not actually acquire serious and relevant knowledge via computers.
I ran across a successful instance of computer education some time ago. The curious thing is that it doesn’t seem to be ballyhooed very much. You would think our educators want it swept under the rug.
Vero Beach High School, 1987
But that was 1987. What was happening with computers back then. Intel had not yet even introduced the 486 processor. The Pentium was 5 years away. How powerful a computer could you get for $5,000 in 1987?
Today some people want to put down these netbooks as not being powerful enough. This ain’t about power, it’s about money. How many companies want people jumping to $350 computers when they are trying to sell $1,000 machines?
But our issue is education. These netbooks can give kids cheap portability and they can do more than any $5,000 computer could back in 1987. So if they proved in Florida that kids likely to drop out could actually enjoy learning with computers what can really be done with these netbooks?
Do you ever think that there are really people who do not want a society of mostly well educated people? How do you maintain a class structured society without a segment of mis-educated peons?
The Fun They Had
We can have it 148 years early with Netbooks.
psik
May 01, 2009
Understanding design & software freedom: 2009-03-07 John Taylor Gatto on “Open Source Education”
susan28
May 29, 2009
i remember reading this speech by Woodrow Wilson once in an address to Princeton where he outright stated in no uncertain terms that we must intentionally stunt the development and curtail the social mobility of the vast majority of people to meet the needs of the coming industrial society and that the school system was the proper mechanism to do that – and he was a principal before he was president and a rabid Presbyterian to boot. a freaking Calvinist nightmare with all his National Destiny tirades and ranting about “non-conformists” being marked for destruction along with all other “malcontents”. he was fucking *nuts*, mama didn’t hug him enough or something, and not surprisingly hailed as one of our “greatest” presidents as all tyrants are.
reading Gatto is like waking up and realising you really weren’t crazy all these years and they really are out to get you, heh. a true American hero.
<a href=”www.spinninglobe.net/gattopage.htm” title=”here” is a collection of articles he wrote for SKOLE, The Journal of American Education, along with some ideas from different alternative schooling groups, and is a collection of more philosophical essays of his on Preservenet, including The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, all required reading.
the url’s incase the links don’t take are spinninglobe-dot-net-slash-gettopage-dot-htm and preservenet-dot-com-slash-theory-slash-gatto-dot-html.
Michael is that Gatto’s whole Liberty Forum presentation? i was positively livid at having missed it when i found out he’d been there and am hoping he’s coming again this year – any word on that?
susan28
May 30, 2009
it should say “gattopage” not “gettopage” on the spinninglobe url in the last post. i see i’m continuing to bat a thousand on the dang hyperlinks, heh..
Jan 06, 2010
Liberty Conspiracy – 1-5-10 Peppermint and Govt. Schools | Homeland Stupidity
Jan 18, 2010
Government study finds Head Start “costly failure” | Homeland Stupidity