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Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

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After 26 years of teaching in the New York public schools, John Taylor Gatto has seen a lot. His book,Dumbing Us Down, is a treatise against what he believes to be the destructive nature of schooling. The book opens with a chapter called "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher," in which he outlines sevenharmful lessons he must convey as a public schoolteacher: 1.) confusion 2.) class position 3.) indifference 4.) emotional dependency 5.) intellectual dependency 6.) provisional self-esteem 7.) constant surveillance and the denial of privacy.

How ironic it is that Gatto's first two chapters contain the text of his acceptance speeches for NewYork State and City Teacher of the Year Awards. How ironic indeed, that he uses his own award presentation as a forum to attack the very same educational system that is honoring him! Gatto describes schooling, as opposed to learning, as a "twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the onlycurriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it," taunts the author.

While trapped in this debilitative system along with his students, Gatto, observed in them anoverwhelming dependence. He believes that school teaches this dependence by purposely inhibitingindependent thinking, and reinforcing indifference to adult thinking. He describes his students as"having almost no curiosity, a poor sense of the future, are a historical, cruel, uneasy with intimacy, and materialistic."

Gatto suggests that the remedy to this crisis in education is less time spent in school, and more timespent with family and "in meaningful pursuits in their communities." He advocates apprenticeships andhome schooling as a way for children to learn. He even goes so far as to argue for the removal of certification requirements for teachers, and letting "anybody who wants to, teach."

Gatto's style of writing is simple and easy to follow. He interlaces personal stories throughout the book to bring clarity and harmony to his views, while also drawing on logic and history to support his ideas about freedom in education and a return to building community. He clearly distinguishes communities from networks: "Communities ... are complex relationships of commonality and obligation," whereas, "Networksdon't require the whole person, but only a narrow piece."

While Gatto harshly criticizes schooling, we must realize that his opinions do come as a result of 26 yearsof experience and frustration with the public school system. Unfortunately, whether or not one agrees with his solutions, he has not outlined the logistics of how these improvements would be implemented. His ideas are based on idealism, and the reality of numbers and economics would present many obstacles. Nevertheless, it gives us a clear vision and a direction to follow for teachers and parents who believe in the family as the most important agent for childrearing and growth.

Everyone who has something to do with children should read this book: Educators, parents, counselors and employers.

This is not a book about solutions- This is a book about recognizing the problem. As we know, recognizing the problem is the first step to correcting the situation.

This is a series of essays and speaches the author has written about education in the United States. Mr. Gatto is an award winning teacher who has taken the brave step of stating what he sees wrong with education. As only someone who has worked in the system for so long can really see the problems, he not only sees the problems, he shares them with the rest of the nation.

As a teacher who has quit to stay at home with my children, I agree whole heartedly with Mr. Gatto. As a teacher who has vowed to home school, I agree with Mr. Gatto.

Education does what it was set up to do- to teach the masses, to tame the unruly individual thinkers, and more. Mr. Gatto's seven lessons that school teaches is exactly on target. Unfortunately.
How do we change the education system? It will take a shift of thinking across the nation. This book is just a small drop in the tidal wave of events that needs to happen. Each person reading this book and acting on it only adds to the rising wave of education reform.

Truly a well thought out book written by a brave man who was willing to put his job and living on the line for what he believes.

John Taylor Gatto was an award-winning public school teacher when he wrote much of the text for this book. He reveals the curriculum of public schools nationwide under the headings: Confusion, Class Position, Indifference, Emotional Dependency, Intellectual Dependency, Provisional Self-Esteem, and One Can't Hide. He asserts that the true goal of childhood learning should be to discover some meaning in life...a passion or an enthusiasm that will drive subsequent learning pursuits. Instead, schools cram irrelevant facts into young minds, substituting book-knowledge for self-knowledge. This book explains a lot for anyone who got good grades, went to college, and then didn't have any idea what to do with his life. It's also a wake-up call to parents with school-age children. Do we really want our children to grow up to be good factory workers and do as they're told? Do we really want them to buy into the "Good grades=good jobs" myth? Do we want them to believe that the goal in life is to acquire more and more stuff to fuel consumerism? Or should we give them more reflective, unstructured time in childhood to find out who they are, what they like, and how they can contribute to their communities? Dumbing Us Down is a quick, worthwhile read.

In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

I would recommend this book for anyone concerned about the problems of public, institutionalized education. It raises important challenges, the kind that are hidden in plain sight and often go unaddressed. As someone who survived K-Bacchelaureate with straight A's and psychological scars, only to learn too late that the words "Summa Cum Laude" on my degree were my reward in full, I find that many of Gatto's charges against institutional schools ring utterly true. Such schools teach their structure more than any content, and that that structure's facetious fragmentation of time and content, its pigeonholing of students by age, its usurpation of all personal privacy and dignity, and its very compulsory nature are actively hostile to the humanity and self-sufficiency we should want for students.

To me, however, Gatto's proposed solutions become problematic. His prescription is for true communities of a kind that perhaps no one I know---not even my parents and grandparents---can actually reconcile with the environment they grew up in. One friend in particular was disturbed by his proposed solutions because she was the child of a poor, single, and rather dysfunctional mother who was not well-equipped to facilitate her education without the availability of some kind of public school. Any solution to the school problem must address such situations, rather than simply trusting that all families and all communities will be functional and will meet children's needs if left to themselves.

Chapter 5, "The Congregational Principle," which focuses on proposed solutions, disturbs me most. Gatto vacillates from praising Socrates' condemnation of the Sophists for taking money to teach to espousing unleashing pure market forces on education. His exalted example is colonial New England towns that were able to achieve "true communities" through the option of excluding or oppressing undesirables. His point that these communities eventually corrected themselves from within without coercion (and the backlash it produces) is well taken, but as a liberal, I think it irresponsible to respond to the injustices of race, gender, and class by just leaving communities to their own prejudices and trusting that they'll be better a century after my death than they are now. Such triumphs of justice as Black Emancipation, Women's Suffrage, and the Civil Rights Act are, in my view, worth the fight, even if they did trump the judgement of some communities, and I don't follow Gatto's logic that immediately equates such nationwide achievements with nationally centralized school curricula that result in lifeless and mechanical schooling.

Perhaps my single biggest problem with this book is the lack of citations. I'm not prepared to take some of the author's scientific and historical assertions at face value---like a literacy rate of 98% in Massachusetts before compulsory schooling began, or the assertion that teaching the basic "three R's" takes only 100 hours with a motivated student---and feel that these need citations to investigate or confirm for myself.

Despite its problems, however, I would still call the book a "must read" for anyone with an interest in the issue. Gatto's criticisms of our schools' basic paradigm are ones we cannot afford to ignore, and although his proposed solutions may be flawed, we benefit from listening and weighing what he has to say.

I picked up this book with some skepticism after another teacher told me that I ought to read it. After the the first essay, The Seven-Lesson Teacher, I was hooked. John Taylor Gatto eloquently says much of what I had been thinking after teaching high school science for 8 years. I had told my husband when I left teaching high school that I felt that high school could not be reformed but must be completely re-imagined. I had complained about the assembly-line approach to education in American high schools. I never felt I knew my students or understood what they hoped to accomplish in school and in my class.

This is a must read for anyone involved in the education of children and especially those who have an inchoate sense that something is wrong with the way we are teaching our children. In the essays in this book, John Taylor Gatto discusses the hidden national curriculum (The Seven-Lesson Teacher) and its inevitable result. In his essay The Psychopathic School, he discusses the link between the way we teach our children and the problems they manifest (no sense of past or future, lack of ability to pay attention, no sense that anything is important, and more). The essay, The Green Monogahela, shows the reader John's background and the informal, learn-from-life way that he learned the most important lessons of his life. Finally, in We Need Less School, Not More, John discusses the difference between family and community, and pseudo-community (he calls it networks) that pervade our national institutions, as well as the importance of a real community to real education. Finally, in the Congregation Principle, John discusses the importance of difference and variety as a corrective to social mistakes and social injustice. He emphasizes that people must be allowed to learn for themselves what works for them--a liberty that is the very foundation of our nation.

This book is an important book, because in it are discussions of ideas of great import to our direction as a nation. Again, I urge anyone with an interest in education and in the future of our country to read it. But be warned! This is a book that matters--and like all such books, the ideas in it will change your life.

I took my son out of school in August 2006 in order to educate him at home. It has been the most amazing adventure of my life.

You will rethink the whole idea of "public schooling as we know it," if you read this book. One of the points Gatto emphasizes is that chopping learning time into 45 minute segments and "living by the bell" kills curiosity, instead of fostering it. He ought to know, after the many years he has spent in the school system. How different our method is, for another example, of covering topics superficially, and reiterating them year after year, than the Japanese way of covering one topic in depth, until it is mastered (for comparisons of systems, and other great ideas, read "Market Education" by Andrew Coulson). Gatto gives thinking people all the more reason to fight for freedom of education, which should be as sacrosanct as freedom of religion, if we took our Constitution seriously.

In Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto, a public school teacher, states the problems with American schools and how these problems are the barriers to educating children. He explains how these areas should be removed to unlock the precious stone of the child. Gatto begins by describing seven lessons taught in schools across the nation. They are confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem and one can't hide.

Next, John Taylor Gatto regresses to his childhood and explains how he learned to teach by being taught by those in his hometown of Monongahela. He learned life lessons. Years later he became a teacher after abandoning his profession as a copywriter. He wanted meaning in his life and he found it in the teaching profession after he helped a child move out of a classroom where she didn't belong.

Gatto then discusses the importance of family and friends. He explains that schools have caused a separation and decline of the family unit by not providing adequate time for families to interact. A child needs this interaction with his family to develop one's self. A school, he states, creates conformists.

So what is the solution to the problem of educating people? Gatto says decision making should be made on the community level, not a network, and not at the national level. He encourages communities to try new ways to accomplish goals and then learn from their mistakes. He also believes everyone in the community should contribute to the education of its people. They need to involve individuals and have them work together in the community. These community members must respect different opinions. His last view is our society needs to learn to trust children and families, and allow them to do what they think is best.

This book is easy reading but can be annoying to some readers. If you get past the first section without being too agitated you will come to an understanding of his point of view, but not necessarily agree.

You may be able to read this book in only a few hours but it may just change the way you view public schooling forever. John Taylor Gatto makes a compelling case for eliminating public "schooling" and returning education to the parents were it belongs. In one profound paragraph he neatly sums up the reason public schools don't educate. "The debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons outlined (Confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self esteem, and one can't hide) such a curriculum produces phisical, moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under disscussion in our national histeria about falling academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid." Clearly Mr Gatto knows the difference between "schooling" and real education and how to achieve the latter.()

It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi