Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, 10th Anniversary Edition Paperback – February 1, 2002

Good book. I have spent almost twenty years in college education. Colleges had to adjust their material to the watered down curriculum that gets passed on to it from high schools. At one point I had attempted teaching in the high school system but it is poisoned. They are more oriented to social indoctrination than education. There is still safety in Mathematics and the physical sciences if you can make it to upper division classes.

Reading this in high school really opens your eyes!

This book this for the ones who care about education.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a child in school. Do you face ugly truths head on, exploring and studying them or do you feel powerless against them? This book is a great introduction to the topic of education and its relationship to community and self-realization. You'll feel relief and anger at the same time, and you'll find that even as an individual, you do have the power to help move us in the right direction. Do you have the courage to honor your curiosity about it?

If you are skeptical of those who criticize the institution of public education, you may want to look up another book that explains the same thing Gatto is getting at, but does it much more objectively: The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. [...]

Gatto also wrote a more objective and penetrating history of American Education[...]

While these books are provided for free by their authors and publishers, I recommend a purchase in order to support their important work.

Explains why the U.S. is failing compared to the rest of the world. A must have for any library and should be read by all those who are involved in the education system in America, if they really did care about improving the system, which most do not.

Achieving maximum learning requires freedom. The author states learning is maximized by taking on a 1000 internships, active participation in the community, and periods of isolated reflection. The principles of democracy are essential in education. A broad range of freedom needs to given to the student to explore ideas. Internship implies sharing information and knowledge with a potential employee, aimed at increasing their professional capability, before employment. Learning is increased as knowledge is put into action. Servicing and learning are tightly integrated and provide purpose to the learning. Service is the key to creating a connectedness with the community. Periods of isolated reflection allow the student to meditate on the principles and information they have learned. Abstraction, synthesis, and integration mental process allow the information to evolve into other ideas or principles. Think of the sculpture of the thinking man, deeply focused in thought, reflecting and studying what he knew, sitting on a rock in isolation.
The author makes the follow observations. 1. Schools are networks not communities. 2. Our kids are taught to anonymous 3. Its better to lie or partial lie to avoid being caught 4. Telling the truth or reporting wrong doings is wrong 5. Schools claim social engineering values such as providing a better environment for the poor. Social advantages such as: food, shelter, medical, and recreation 5. The education system values: competition, intimidation, and control more than principles of democracy. 6. Students are taught "more is better." More money creates more happiness. 7. Kids are taught to network, making contacts with individuals in the network, and keeping information exclusive. 8. Many of the social problems of teen pregancy, drugs, and violence are associated with the rich rather than the poor. 9. The system often mis-diagnose the smart kids as dumb. Time in the class is often filled with tests and verbal reading.
The sad truth is school values translate into individual values. If your child thinks its ok, to spend hours down in their room listening to their music, refusing to eat at the dinner table, or participate in family activities, you start to wonder. If your child spend countless hours in homework and very little time interacting with the family, you wonder. If your child is brilliant and you watch her struggle with grades, you wonder. If your child was previously curious about things and often worked on individual projects and research but suddenly stop, you wonder. If you go for periods of time without noticing your child, you wonder. We are becoming a society of individuals, networked, without identity, and without value to the community. This is very distrubting.
Discontent is good. Discontent creates change. Change is healthy. The machinery of public education needs reinvention. This book is helpful step in helping people to think about 1. why change is necessary 2. why more parential involvement with the childrens education is needed 3. and why the current education system has fail us.

A short group of essays themed around the failure and in fact the doomed nature of compulsory schooling run by government. I found myself wanting to take my kids out of school and home school them immediately. It's a shame that so long after these essays little has been done to act on them.

We have a lot more choices than we think we do when it comes to our children's education. Or, we should have. Read John Taylor Gatto, even if you choose the public school system, to examine your own attitudes and assumptions and those of the people in the education system in the United States. What lessons are we really teaching our kids? What lessons do we want them to learn? Compare Gatto's "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" with your lists.