The Ultimate History Lesson:
A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto First Edition, 2nd Printing Former New York City and New York State School Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, illustrates HOW and WHY our public schools are dumbing us down… and what We can do about it. With more than 200 footnotes, and more than 30 classic texts referenced; this 5-hour interview session, memorializing John s research, publications, and life experiences, forms an impeccable family resource and reference library of The Underground History of American Education. Each hour focuses on examining the evolution of ideas, which manifest today in the phenomenon of public schooling. By dissecting the history and presenting you with the references, you re left at the end of each hour, with a copious amount of information to digest; from which you can continue your own personal journey of discovery. This interview also includes solutions, documents, and references; asking only that you consider the information THINK FOR YOURSELF and communicate with others in order to share a higher-level of awareness, thus protecting ourselves from financial predators. This presentation is offered as a public service thanks to the generosity the subscribers of the Tragedy and Hope online community, which is an international research and study group, composed of individuals who have screened our productions, and seek to take the next-steps in enacting strategic solutions. The main thesis of John s body of work can best be illustrated in my opinion by asking the question: What do public schools actually teach children? , and answering it with the main themes contained in John s first book, printed in 1992, titled Dumbing Us Down , he makes the following observations about how public schools are designed in form and function: 1. Public schooling teaches confusion by breaking coherence. It presents an ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. 2. Public Schooling teaches them to accept their class affiliation. 3. Public Schooling makes them indifferent and suppresses natural curiosity. 4. Public Schooling makes them emotionally dependent on approval from authority. 5. Public Schooling makes them intellectually dependent on experts and authorities to think on their behalf. 6. Public Schooling teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts and authorities (provisional self-esteem). 7. Public Schooling makes it clear to them that they are always supervised, under surveillance, and cannot hide; especially in today s society where everything online is tracked and private information is sold in a variety of ways to a variety of predators. Bibliography: John s poetic prose and diligent documentation can be studied in his prodigious preponderance of publications; including: 1. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992) 2. The Exhausted School (1993) 3. A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling (2000) 4. The Underground History of American Education (2001) 5. Against School published by Harper s Magazine (2003) 6. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling