How Public Education Cripples Our Children, And Why
An insightful and provocative expose’ on the sorry state of our educational system, by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto is no stranger to this issue, and his radical analysis does not come lightly, being the former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author of ‘The Underground History of American Education’.
This was published back in 2003 in Harpers Magazine, and is must reading for anyone involved in the teaching profession or concerned about the future of American education.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.
