Customer Reviews

The Underground History of American Education

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read this book after a lifetime of public schooling- from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact, I had trained to be a teacher myself at one point. When I found this book I literally could not put it down. Gatto was stating everything that I had intuitively known was wrong with the American public school system all along in amazing encyclopedic detail. I truly felt like I was reading a secret history that I was never supposed to find out about. I have yet to find a flaw or inaccuracy in any of what he points out- it all has the loud ring of Truth.

The major premise here is that American schooling has been dumbed down to provide mindless, loyal workers who cannot think for themselves. At least this is the schooling provided to the masses. This was a deliberate act with roots in 19th century industrialism. He shows how the Civil War demonstrated to industrialists and financiers how a standardized population trained to follow orders without significant thought could be made to function as a money tree. Moreover, the proper schooling could be used to strip the common population of its power to cause trouble. You see, our global power and corporate wealth is based on a third-rate educational system that actually works against developing men and women of true character and intellect. The mindless bureaucrat and worker who follows a system without thought or question is the pattern that our "efficient" system depends on. That is what schooling produces. One should never confuse schooling with true education- and definitely not with intelligence.

There is just so many fascinating facts here that you will find nowhere else. I found it especially illuminating that the early British and American educational pioneers (who influenced schooling all over the world) were strongly influenced by the system of schooling that existed in India- a system that existed primarily to sustain the caste system. Of course the tie-ins with the mechanistic, authoritarian Prussian state were also enlightening (Prussia has historically been described as "an army with a country" and "a gigantic penal institution.") There is also his mention of the Chinese "Dangan"- a western inspired lifelong personnel file that follows you from job to job- unless there is anything "unusual" in it, whereas, you will never get another decent job. Kind of sounds like the kind of background checking and privacy invasion that American based corporations have instituted the last few decades.

As the author states, a truly educated person writes his own script through life- he is not a character in a government or corporation play. The educated person is self-determined to a large degree.

And, as Jefferson said, an educated person knows the ways of the human heart so well that he's tough to cheat or fool.

Refuse to be cheated or fooled any longer- read this book.

The amount of history presented in this book is almost overwhelming. At the same time it is compelling to read. I could hardly put the book down.
I had no idea how much social engineering takes place in our government schools. This is an eye opening exposure of the hidden agendas that have and are driving our educational system.
I disagree with the first reviewer. Corporal punishment in schools of old, is briefly touched on in the beginning of the book.It was not a major position of any kind. I wonder if he/she read more than just the very beginning of the book.
If you were educated in the public schools then you should read this book. If anyone that you care about is or will be educated in the public schools then you should read this book.

This is the best book on the subject of schooling I've ran into. I absolutely love this book. He presents evidence to prove his points very clearly. I find his history very accurate, although I'm not an "expert." I would really like anyone to challenge this book just to see if it can be done.
The previous review misses the point completely, especially the one that says this book endorses hitting. I question whether that reviewer read any of the book. This book is a work of pure passion and intellect. Even if you hate the subject of education and want to fall asleep whenever the subject comes up, you would find this book fascinating.
I think he's my hero. I wish this were written 15 years ago.

Carthago delendum est. The public schools must be destroyed!

That is the thrust of Gatto's book. Gatto, a lifelong teacher in the public system, spent 10 years researching and exposing the deep seated revoltion he had for the system he found himself stuck in.

This is an eye opener for anyone. It will make you rethink not only public schools, but any school. It prompted me to start writing my own book on education (since Gatto admittedly has no alternative and I've been unsatisfied with the many faces of classical education). Gatto's accounts of his own education I found most interesting.

On the whole I think Gatto is correct, although he is somewhat selective, but then I can overlook that since it is an invective and a alarm to free minds and hearts -- or rather a call to arms. Since I have read much on education and am primarily a Latin teacher as well as one very interested in classical education, his book gave me both impetus and pause: an impetus to continue to research the real aims of education (pre-twentieth century) and search for fitting means but also pause because Gatto shows that mandatory k-12 education is a modern invention that for some may be both stultifying and ennervating. He reminds me of a real alternative for many that one can find in that wonderful book (not the movie) "To Kill a Mockingbird".

That said, I must make one comment about his selectivity: Gatto rightly points out that Washington and Franklin were self-educated men, but he overlooks the formal, classical education of a Madison, Jefferson and others. The traditional American education was a mixture of self-educated, self-motived, self-made men and the classically trained (which is a training of the mind in clear thinking, to put it concisely). Both were necessary to secure liberty. Both are still necessary. Nevertheless, Gatto correctly points out that the modern public, bureaucratic expert gurus and wizards of education, willy-nilly, seek only to make geldings, unAmerican absolutely.

A must read, for anyone who wants to see the real aims of education these last hundred years, and find some way of finding a true education for himself and his children. It's all on-line (though I prefer a text), and can be purchased at Gatto's own website.

(A note: I read the book some time ago, but I hardly recall anything about corporal punishment in the book. It is but a footnote in his 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.

Hands down,one of the top 5 books I have thus far read in my 38 yr life.
I recommend it to anyone and everyone,every chance I get.
It's scope goes beyond what you think you know about education,and indeed goes beyond education,into social policy,history,psychology,etc.
Everyone who has ever attended school would benefit from reading this.
One would not be the same after reading this book.
The title 'modern schooling' is a bit of a misnomer,in that it is really a deep history of schooling,and modern if one takes modern as being the past 150 years.
The chapters can be read for free at Gatto's website [...] ,as well.
LOVED this book. Cannot say enough about how it has enlightened,connected the dots and inspired me. And it is true intellectual juice,for those who like real words and real thinking: a real book!

Reading over the wide array of reviews and ratings on this book makes me think that someone needs to write an essay called "How to Read Gatto."

John Gatto is a rambler, no doubt, but his rambling always has a point, and usually a very good one. He's what we might call an exploratory writer -- exploring not only the topic but his own thoughts on it as he writes. C. S. Lewis was given to this style of writing at times.

The charge that Gatto does not always do what he suggests he will do and that he fails to adequately document his sources holds water, but the charge that he is a poor writer holds no water whatsoever. Gatto is a brilliant writer, the kind that makes you really think, the kind who can stop you in your tracks with a single turn of phrase and set you to thinking about it all day long.

On the history of education, Gatto is the beginning point for the serious researcher -- the place to fully engage the brain and inure it against the inadequate picture that will form in your mind if you concentrate only on statistics and lists of facts.

Gatto understands that if we do not seek the meaning of education, attempting to execute it is a dangerous endeavor to the human spirit and to society at large. This, more than anything else, is the important thing we can glean from his writings.

So maybe The Underground History of American Education is not quite accurately titled. Read it anyway -- it's worth every minute.

If this book does not make you pull your kids out of public school, something is very wrong. I have the revised edition, and although I agree that it is a bit long, over 400 pgs, it is worth the time and energy to read. When you see your own thoughts articulated so well, things you had a hunch about but never could put into words, it is such a relief to know that you are not alone. As a longtime homeschooler, reading this book always gives me renewed determination to continue when I am feeling burned out. There is just no way I could do to my kids what is described in this book. Although I am aware not every school is exactly the same, the truth is that they are all tied to the same Humanistic, yet anti-Human, teaching methods. Gatto is so right-on when he says that by eliminating God from schools, we have taken away any real meaning or hope for the future. Our children are being destroyed by the goals of management and conformity and especially consumerism. The chapters referring to these trends are worth the book even if you don't read the rest. Ever notice how people are now referred to as *consumers*? That is all we are to corporate leaders.( Notice how the recession is being blamed on consumers not spending enough money!!) Gatto also aptly explains the reason that bullies are allowed to continue terrorizing the weaker pupils; it keeps the general peace to allow bad behaviour rather than attempt to do something about it. It is all about management, not about education! Free yourself and your children from the tyranny of compulsory schooling. It's not too late!

This book is a must have for anyone not succumbing to the conformities of public schooling (which likely means everyone reading this review)!!!
Gatto compiled eight years and hundreds of pages of research from top socialists, businessmen, and politicians seeking to control the populous. The roots mostly center around the Prussian military system, from which Horace Mann had his "great" idea.


In my experience, school was a device which was too easy yet I spent 1000+ hours doing needless homework for. Things like ADHD medication helped my schooling, but not my more intimate journey known as education. You may not agree with his small family/town alternatives, but they are all based on historical facts regardless.

This book drove me crazy. I admire John Gatto and I mostly agree with everything he says about American compulsory schooling. I myself homeschooled my son for nine years. But this book is terrible. I expected it to be a coherent history of compulsory schooling in America, and the masterminds behind it, but instead he keeps dropping hints all along that he is going to explain how it all happened and how school turned into a prison/factory, but it takes him forever to get around to telling the historical story. There are lots of digressions into his personal experiences, which would be fine if they were in one or two chapters instead of sprinkled into the supposed history. Also, there are no footnotes to his sources, so you can't follow up on any of his assertions and check them or do more reading on that particular aspect of the story. He does give a bibliography at the end of recommended reading, but I wish he had documented all along where he got his facts.

Gatto would probably say that I am acting like an over-schooled prissy academic, but there are reasons that historians document their work: so that other people can check the same documents and see if the historian's interpretation is valid. Gatto doesn't do this, so we just have to take his word for it.

Somebody should write a carefully researched and well-documented history of compulsory schooling in America and how it got hijacked by corporate interests.

I have to say that I sometimes wondered how Gatto got so far as an English teacher with such abominable writing and researching skills. Maybe he thinks it's stupid to organize your thoughts before you start writing; that's what they teach you in school, after all! The problem with school is not the content of what is taught there, though, at least the academic content; the problem is that it's all day, 32 weeks out of the year, just you and thirty kids the same age as you, in a room with one adult, shut away from the real work of the world. How can anybody learn anything under those circumstances? The real miracle is that anybody learns anything while in the classroom, in spite of the noise, the bullying, the cheating, the violence, and the general low morale.