Customer Reviews

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.

THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.

In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thought, and more easily controlled; most people involved in the system no doubt believe that they are trying their best to really teach their students. However, the system itself (which Gatto often characterizes as a complex web) ensures that its real purpose is served, despite the efforts of individual reformers within it - that true democracy is rendered unworkable even as the trappings of democracy are allegedly bolstered. Seen in this light, these institutions that produce barely literate, dependent, conformist, incomplete individuals full of emotional and psychological problems, who lack real knowledge (and whose capacity for acquiring such is deliberately weakened or eliminated), and who are just `educated' enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, are not, in fact, failing schools - on the contrary, if we are to believe Gatto's analysis, they are performing their designated function PERFECTLY. That purpose is to mold people in such a way as to make them more easily controlled by corporations and the state (a clear-cut example of how, contrary to popular myth, the interests of big business and those of big government more often than not coincide.)

Though the organization of the book is somewhat haphazard, this book is compulsively readable to any critical thinker with an open mind to consider what's REALLY wrong with our school system (and, no, it's nothing so simple as a shortage of funds or a lack of `accountability' -- the real problems are deeper, philosophical, and systemic.) The book is absolutely riveting, and the country would be better off if more citizens read it and demanded real change to the system.

Gatto's book deserves five stars because it dares to speak the truth.

This book is on my all-time top 10 list. While it is well worth the price, it is also available in its entirety online, at www.johntaylorgatto.com for free. I read it there first, and then purchased it to read again, annotate, and loan to friends. Gatto's books are all excellent, but this one is his opus. I also highly recommend Education: Free and Compulsory by Murray Rothbard. This is also available online, free, at www.mises.org. It was written decades ago, in the 60's I believe, and is amazing in its support of homeschooling, an option essentially unknown at that time. It is much shorter, at about 150 pages, than Underground History and so makes a good starting point. Mises is a generally excellent source for all manner of libertarian writings. They operate an online bookstore, but every item they control the copyright to is also available free online. As a result of these books (and many others also), we have liberated 3 of our children from the tyranny, thought control, and general low standards of our local magnet school. Our 4th is a senior this year. I'm sorry it is too late for him, but we certainly won't be sending him to a public university. My entire experience with now 13 years of public schools can be summed up in four words - I had no idea. I would also suggest that if you have children in public school now, esp high school, have them bring home all their text books and look over them closely. You may be surprised to see the PC content of the texts, not just the obvious history, government, and economics books but also English (we have an English grammar book, but we don't use it at all - indeed the pages are in pristine condition is spite of being issued to 3 previous students. Also, we don't actually write term papers, even in two years of AP English, although we do make videos. I'm sure our college profs will accept those as well. And we are well up to speed in Oprah Lit.), math (we don't do proofs in Geometry, they aren't tested on the SAT you know) and of course science, the most PC of all (few actual labs, but we do draw posters in the lab as group projects- cooperation is very important, and fully one third of our course syllabus in biology is devoted to evolution, ecology, and global warming - because the debate is over, don't you know). Let me emphasize that this is the only magnet academic high school in the city, not just an average public school. My son is a National Merit Finalist this year, one of 22 in his class. This school consistently has more Finalists than any other school in TN - they are very good at test prep, leaving the impression that they are teaching something worth knowing. I didn't know before, but now I do, and you will too if you read Gatto's book.

After reading Gatto's "Underground History of American Education" I must take my place amongst the fence-sitters. Before giving my reasons, I should give a bit of background. I am a former public school teacher who left disillusioned for reasons similar to Gatto. I do not support the public school system and have much ideological affinity with Gatto (so I am not biased against his point of view). Currently, I am a PhD student studying the philosophy and history of education (so I believe I'm relatively competent to judge this history as history).

That said...

I really wanted to love this book, and ideologically, I did. I agree much with Gatto's depiction of public ed's history as one that seeks to homogenize and discipline people rather than to encourage independent thought and learning. I agree with Gatto's assessment that the education "system" existing before public ed was generally better than is portrayed in most education history books (for a good book about this read Market Education: The Unknown History (Studies in Social Philosophy and Policy)), and that the entrepreneurial spirit is much more likely to come from self-education than standardized, mass, compuslory education.

The two stars I subtracted are for the insufficient documentation this book provides. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence, and anyone looking for the latter (regardless of whether they agree with Gatto's former) will be disappointed! Simply put, there are no citations in this book. Even direct quotes are not accompanied by citations, connoting an absolute breach of fair play.

While I happen to know that many of Gatto's facts and assessments are correct - Horace Mann was a phrenology enthusiast who extolled Prussian education without ever seeing it, that 'scientific management' and corporate practice has had overwhelming influence in how we do public ed - there were other facts I wanted to verify. Gatto tends to quote small snippets rather than large blocks of text, which made me want to check some of his sources to see if the quotes were in context. (I was able to track down an ecopy of Carnegie's "Empire of Business" and can attest that Gatto indeed made the book sound more devious than it actually is.) There are also a few other reviewers who have checked several of Gatto's other facts and found them to be inaccurate. But, this is why citations are generally included in histories.

Another problem with the book for which I did not deduct stars but debated on it was the book's scattered format. This book is not in any way a linear history as would be expected. Instead, it is a very scattered collection of short essays - most historical but some personal reflections and polemics - and all of this makes the book seem very unprofessional.

I am giving the book three stars because the facts I do know about the history of education align decently well with Gatto's interpretation. Even reading "mainstream" histories, like Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America, and Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Phoenix Books), it is virtually impossible to read educational history as anything but one dominant group (business, protestantism, etc) trying to use schools to mold the minds of everyone a certain way. (Also, check out cases like Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Ohio v. Quigley also.)

I cannot, however, give this book four or even five stars for the very glaring (and a bit suspicious) omission of citations, and for its very unprofessional style. Overall, an interesting book but far short of what it should have been.

I don't have time to go into a lot of detail. I educate my own four children and it doesn't leave me much time to wax eloquent, but I do feel compelled to add my two cents here. This is a profound, moving, and life changing book. It completely changed my life. I was already homeschooling my kids, but it really gave me comfort and confidence as we entered the teen years. I learned so much about the real history of this country and about industrialization. Some of it broke my heart. Some of it made be extremely angry. I really appreciated that the book was made available online in its entirety. I read most of it there and then promptly purchased it new and for full price - TWICE - because I wanted to support the author. I have never done that before.

Please read this book.

I would have given this book 5 stars for all of the little-known facts Gatto unearths about the history of education. Industrialists, religious fanatics, eugenicists, and various kinds of psychologists are all shown to have worked their agendas into the American public school system.

But I can't give this book 5 stars, because it also reads like a conspiracy theory. It's poorly organized and tends to draw sweeping conclusions based on quotations, events, or facts taken out of context. And since Gatto doesn't generally cite his sources in detail, it's hard to track down the context. He has a clear agenda (and, for the most part, a noble one), but that doesn't mean he's allowed to exaggerate or present misleading -- and sometimes incorrect -- facts with few sources given.

Particularly when you're making huge claims that most historians have neglected, you need to provide sources. That's the difference between revising history and presenting your own conspiracy theory version of history. Unfortunately, Gatto falls into the latter.

While I believe a lot of what this book says, some of it didn't make sense to me, so I started researching some of Gatto's claims. Generally, he gets things mostly right, but he often misrepresents their significance or juxtaposes them with other things inappropriately to make them fit into his narrative of hatred against the school system. And sometimes what he says is simply wrong.

Since this is a brief review, let me just give one example -- illiteracy. Gatto claims that the registrants tested in the WWII draft had only a 4% illiteracy rate. He claims that in Korea, that had risen to 18% illiterate -- Gatto claims this caused the military to call in psychologists to figure out how people were "faking" illiteracy, since they couldn't believe the drop. By Vietnam, the number had risen to 27% illiterate. Yet he says in 1840 that literacy was 93-100% in the U.S. "wherever such a thing mattered." The inference we're supposed to draw is clearly that compulsory public schools (which weren't instituted anywhere until the 1850s) affected literacy negatively. But, for some reason Gatto doesn't explain, these awful schools somehow managed to retain a high literacy rate until WWII. Why the sudden drop? Well, Gatto is getting prepared for a diatribe against whole-word reading education instead of phonics, and that was widely adopted in the mid-20th century.

There are loads of errors in even this small passage. Apparently "wherever such a thing mattered" in 1840 is code for "Northern white male." Overall literacy rates actually varied from 81% to 99% across both the North and South at that time, but note this is based on self-reporting in census data -- the same source of data that claims a 99% literacy rate currently in the U.S., a figure which Gatto rightly derides as inaccurate. Historians have demonstrated that literacy was probably pretty high (90% or so) in 1840 among free males in the U.S. by analyzing other data (and maybe 80% or even higher for females), but Gatto is being selective in choosing what to report.

But let's move on to the draft. Just a few paragraphs later, we learn that literacy in 1940 was 96% for white, 80% for blacks. What happened to the 96% rate for the entire WWII draft we just heard about? Well, apparently, that was only for whites -- he just didn't mention it. Whereas the Korea figures seem to be for all recruits. But it makes it easier to see the trend from 4% to 18% to 27% illiteracy if you select the data dishonestly.

Actually, despite Gatto's claim that the Korean War was when the military became concerned about illiteracy, it was a much greater problem in WWII since more men were needed. In 1940, almost 400,000 men who registered in the first draft registration signed their names with only a mark. They were not only illiterate; they couldn't even write their own name. By 1941, the Army had inducted so many illiterates that they didn't know what to do with them -- so they raised the standard to a 4th-grade education. Note that they weren't tested at first for literacy; they were just presumed literate with a 4th-grade education. (This "test" is presumably where Gatto gets his figures, not from actual literacy tests.) But too many recruits were being turned away, so they relaxed the standard and allowed 5-10% of recruits to be illiterate as long as they were deemed to have the capacity to learn.

What followed was a massive intense educational campaign where the military tried (and usually succeeded) in teaching WWII soldiers basic skills including reading. 10-15% of those who passed the initial qualifications were forced to take those reading classes, which means that 5-10% of recruits with a 4th-grade education were illiterate, and the rest were admitted under the illiterate quota with the capacity to learn. Looking over all the figures, overall illiteracy in the draft pool (which was never explicitly tested per se) was probably 15-20%. And since the majority of the draft pool was white, the higher illiteracy rate for blacks that Gatto quotes doesn't explain this.

Gatto sweeps under the rug this massive literacy campaign in the military, requiring thousands of teachers to teach hundreds of thousands of troops how to read. There was no massive drop in literacy between WWII and Korea -- it went from about 15-20% to 18%.

Moreover, he outright falsifies the number for the Vietnam draft, as far as I can tell. The best information I could find puts illiteracy at 17% in the Vietnam draft pool. Perhaps Gatto is adding in other exemptions for other mental deficiencies (some of which may include illiteracy), but he doesn't cite his sources, so we don't know.

But wait -- there's more. What about the WWI draft? Gatto never mentions it. But 7% of registrants signed their name with a mark for the WWI draft, almost twice the percentage of the WWII draft. Registrants in WWI were given IQ tests, either "alpha" if literate or "beta" if basically illiterate. About 1/3 of registrants were given the beta test, and estimates of literacy based on scores in the draft pool concluded that about 20-25% of registrants were illiterate. Following that news, again there were mass literacy campaigns because the public was outraged at how high illiteracy was. It appears that better schooling apparently did improve public literacy at least by a few percentage points by WWII.

Contrary to Gatto's claim, therefore, illiteracy didn't get significantly worse over the 20th century. At WWI, it was 20-25%, at WWII, it was 15-20%, during Korea, 18%, Vietnam, 17%, and according to recent national studies in the 1990s that Gatto even cites (which were much more thorough at classifying illiteracy than the earlier tests) put illiteracy at 21-23%. Of course, when Gatto cites that last study, he exaggerates the claims to make it sound like only 3.5% have complete literacy. That may be true for advanced (post college-level) literacy, but all the draft statistics put the bar around 4th or 5th grade level, which the 1990s study says makes about 21-23% functionally illiterate. (And since this study used a different test than the military standards, we can't actually compare the numbers, so we don't know if literacy has actually changed.)

In sum, literacy has stayed roughly the same over the 20th century. Perhaps it went up and down slightly, but mostly it has just hovered around 20%. That in itself is an indictment of public schooling, but it apparently wasn't strong enough to make Gatto's point that whole-word reading produced a spectacular number of illiterates. So, he rigged the figures. (I'm not a fan of whole-word reading by the way, either, but I'm not going to make up or misrepresent numbers to try to convince you of my opinion.)

And those are just errors I could find within a couple pages.

I've uncovered half a dozen other examples of misleading claims like this, but finding this stuff out takes quite a bit of research, so I've stopped bothering. But I think anyone who reads this should ask themselves how they feel about the ethics of someone who admits that he isn't going to cite his sources and then obviously chooses to deliberately manipulate evidence in such a way as to produce misleading results that support his own agenda.

It's sort of like Fox News or a Michael Moore documentary. He brings up a lot of good points, but unfortunately I no longer know how much to trust, and how much is just his dishonest rigging of history.

That said, I recommend that you read this book, because it does provide a unique perspective that has a lot of insight. But I can't give it a good rating, because I no longer trust anything he has said unless I've looked it up myself.

And, in a way, I think this makes Gatto not only unethical but a bit hypocritical, since he claims that public schools hide behind their public face and public goals while masking all the hidden agendas going on behind the scenes. And yet, when he claims to be educating us, he doesn't hesitate to do the same thing when it serves his own aims.

What is the function of public education? It isn't to teach basic knowledge and skills for living in society, as I might have ONCE guessed. There is plenty in Gatto's book to show American schools are in place to teach the middle class one thing only: how to be slaves. The earliest public education was in India, and was devised as a mechanism to condition students to accept and propagate the caste system. Later, Prussia adopted the system for similar social control purposes. In the late 1800's, robberbarrons drove the establishment of compulsory public school for the same reasons. They also bought up the textbook publishers and started exerting control on public officials who set the curriculum. By the time Gatto finally turns his eye to present-day public schools, it comes as no surprise what the true nature of the system is: schools are factories designed to produce subservient drones, trained just enough to become low-level functionaries in corporate and government circles. Faux rebellion may be tolerated, but true questioning of the order is not. Imagination and creativity are permitted only in forms that can be channelled to the purposes of the reigning regime. The very most promising students may be groomed for higher positions up the pyramid. (of course never the VERY top; these old robberbaron families believe in bloodline succession for the highest positions of leadership) For the rest, school is meant to dumb us down, keep us from asking questions, keep us paying our taxes, and slowly sink us into a sort of debt-slavery.
Before you write this off as an anti-education screed, please note that Gatto shares with us a very compelling alternate view of what education COULD be. He is quite fair-minded in his criticisms (and praises) of teachers, principals, and others at the bottom who run the system without really understanding its nature. It seems extremely unlikely this was written to grind an axe. For one thing, the information is independently verifiable, and well-reasoned. For another: he was not scorned by the system; he enjoyed New York State's highest honor, State Teacher of the Year, in 1991.

A "must-read", and I hardly ever say that.

The book put a good deal of my past life into perspective; I had spent years trying to introduce effective teaching methods into schools in several different countries, but with very little success. It is actually very easy to teach someone to speak your language, just as it is easy to train students to high level of mathematical skill in a short space of time (my own mathematics degree at a British University absorbed about 3 hours a week over three years and I found it possible to teach students at a similar rate.)

Until I read this book, I was at a loss as to why so many easy and obvious improvements in education were never made. Gatto's explanation is that the purpose of schooling is to impede learning and create a class of unthinking producer-consumers and that the inability of teaching professionals to teach is wilful.

While his explanation seems eminently plausible - it simply is not possible that the teaching profession can be so useless without some good reason - his references are few and it is difficult to establish how influential the people he holds responsible really were/are. I would like to ask if anyone can suggest other material providing evidence for or against this hypothesis or evaluating the importance of those individuals and movements Gatto cites as being active in creating a system which represses learning and retards maturity.

When a friend first told me about this book, I thought perhaps Gatto was a conspiracy theorist, but the well-documented tome disabused me of that idea within the first few pages. I cited this book several times in the writing of my own book, Two Trees of Knowledge: A Biblical Case for the Separation of School and State. I have to admit, it all sounds like a conspiracy theory, but the fact of the matter is that the people in control of government education have been writing about this stuff for over a hundred years--it's just that parents are not paying attention.

Parents are more concerned about meeting the nice teacher in the classroom. (Actually, they spend more time checking out their kids' babysitters than the teachers who are with them 35-plus hours a week.) The fact that the schools are right in our neighborhoods gives an added sense of security--they seem as safe as our own backyard. And we know all the other kids--these things lull us into accepting something that is far from safe.

One thing that should be stressed is that compulsory education laws differ in every state. Keeping kids home for a few extra years makes a world of difference in the damage the school can do. For one thing, children who start school between the ages of 8 and 10, are far less likely to fall into the trap of peer bonding and peer dependency. They already have a sense of self-confidence that renders them far less needy. For another thing, even without any formal schooling, children who start at age 10 are very likely to surpass their peers by eighth grade.

I wish that Gatto had emphasized that people do not have to send their kids to school at age five. Most people I speak to have no idea that they can keep their kids home a few years without penalty. The schools do everything they can to convince people that if they start their children later, they will fall behind. (Look at the names of some educational programs: Headstart, No Child Left Behind.) Just the opposite is true--kids fall behind if they start too early. I would highly recommend that people who are serious about this read Better Late Than Early: A New Approach to Your Child's Education or School Can Wait. These books show the results of over 7,000 studies on 80,000 children over a ten-year period.

For anyone who wants an accurate historical account of the history of public education, Gatto's book is invaluable.

If you have a nagging sense that things aren't as they seem, that Big Brother is in deed watching, this is a book that will help you understand those feelings and clarify the issues. As a parent and a teacher I constantly struggle with the status of education in the U.S. Why is it in a constant need of "saving." Why are so many schools failing? Why do schools resemble prisons? It is one of the very few things in our society in which we do not get a choice. We must go to the school that we are told to and that school is a one-size fits all government jobs-project that may or may not serve your child's and your best interests. We are told where to go, when to go, what to learn, what is important. The trend is ever inching toward the math and sciences - a very left-brained concrete thought process. The liberal arts, particularly history and civics, have been relegated to mere after thoughts. Why? A society of active, engaged and educated citizens make terrible consumers. Thoughful independent people are not good followers. The goal is a strong workforce filled with insecure, immature and rootless technocrats who will consume without remorse, restraint or reflection. Before anything can change in this world you must understand the foe with whom you are at battle. If you are one who takes issue with the control and influence all things BIG - Pharma, Medicine, Education, Unions, Government, Prisons, Corporations, etc- have on your life, this book is a great beginning. It will help you to understand the mindset of those who seek power and the methods used in society, specifically through Education, to produce people who serve their ends (mindless consumption & cooperation) rather than independent, thoughtful and reflective citizens. This book will open your eyes, like Neo in the Matrix, once you go this way you may not return, so it is not recommended for those who wish to remain asleep.

This experienced school teacher reveals the inner workings of the school system, it's less than honorable history, and will make you seriously reconsider your view of education and how the school system has affected it. This particular book is a HUGE work in which he exposes the errors of short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age-grading, standardization, and all the rest of school religion. This groundbreaking, revolutionary work will change the way you look at the process and even the very concept of public education. Every parent should read this book! It shows how compulsory schooling came to be as it is in America with a lure of utopia and a very strong Prussian connection (which should be cause for much concern). It also exposes the affects of compulsory schooling on America, drawing both from history (showing alarming drops in education, literacy, and much more) and 30 years of school-teaching experience.

***You CAN read this book online for free from his website... (Amazon won't let me put in a link, so just google his name and you'll find it.) BUT, like I said, this is a HUGE book, and reading it all online would be quite tiresome to the eyes. I actually started reading it on his site but it hooked me in so I decided to buy it in book form.

This book is a very worthwhile read. I will say that it isn't 100% optimally organized and edited, but you won't find the material easily elsewhere either. So... if you're willing to be a little forgiving on the writing in places, you'll learn more than you ever dreamed of the true history of American Education.

His books have helped me to rethink my view of education- what it can be, what it should be, and what it isn't in America. This has been of great help as my husband and I have decided to educate our own children, and we've reshaped our views of education.

I also highly recommend reading his other books... they are much shorter, and are revealing of the current state of schools from his 30 year school-teaching experience:

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (which shows the deliberate dumbing down of the American School System, and displays "how the U.S. educational system cranks out students the way Detroit cranks out Buicks. He contends that students are more programmed to conform to economic and social norms rather than really taught to think.")

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling: "Focuses on mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking. Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable, remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the industrial economy and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state."

**Although I can't give a direct link in this review, you can find my website by accessing my profile. I mention that because I have a LOT of great resources on my site for those who are in the process of rethinking education and determining what that means for them and their children.**