Free Republic

Estimable Ms. Cook (a teacher at an elite public high school), Thank you for your course in Ethnic Studies. Before the school year commences, I would like at least to afford you the opportunity of evading the end-of-career prospect, of the meaninglessness of excessive reliance on disposable ideation, the unfortunate fate of those who invest in the most politically expedient and, indeed, fashionable ideas, only to find at the end of one’s career, being left with the sense, “What was it all for? Who was helped? Did any of the students really care about what I was teaching?” (Father McKenzie...

Youtube video: 7:05 This video is well worth the time. John Taylor Gatto-The Purpose of Schooling So?....With the government schools becoming increasingly more prison-like,( and with children literally be arrested for behavior that was once seen as a learning opportunity and handled within the school), do John Gatto's comments ring true? I think they do. If children attend the government's godless prison-like schools and are treated like state prisoners within the prison-like compounds, they risk learning to be comfortable with being state prisoners. The continuation of government schooling has, and will have, evil consequences for the child and for the...

I write this essay with a heavy heart. I’ve always considered myself an ardent advocate for education. But a recent rally staged by teachers and students in favor of school funding forced me to reluctantly acknowledge an awful truth:We have to destroy education in order to save it.Let me explain how I came to this miserable conclusion.The May 13 “State of Emergency” School Funding Protest A few weeks ago (on Friday, May 13, to be precise) teachers up and down the state of California protested for more school funding. This mass multi-city “State of Emergency” protest was meant to be...

Experts have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling to serve their own pocketbooks. The difficulty is not that children don't learn to read, write and do arithmetic very well - it is that kids don't learn at all the way schools insist on teaching. When we strip children of a primary experience base - as confinement schooling must do to justify its very existence -we destroy the natural sequences of learning which always put experience first. Only much later, after a bath of experience, can the thin gruel of abstraction mean anything. We haven't forgotten this, but there...

I'll start off bluntly by giving you some data I'd be shocked if you already know. A few simple facts, all verifiable, which by their existence call into question the whole shaky edifice of American government compulsion schooling from kindergarten through college and its questionable connection with the job market. The implications of this data are quite radical so I'm going to take pains to ground it in the most conservative society on earth, the mountain world of Switzerland. You all remember Switzerland: that's where people put their money when they really want it to be really safe. The Swiss...

John Taylor Gatto Speech to the Vermont Homeschooling Conference (Note: John Gatto is the former New York State Teacher of the Year who renounced the government school system in his landmark book DUMBING US DOWN. He is constantly in demand as a public speaker. As a bit of background, the industrial titans of the 1890's began to think that not only could the production line be engineered, but people's lives could be engineered as well, in order to work like homogeneous robots with the machines. People like Rockefeller and Carnegie gave huge sums to prominent academics to see if this...

A Billion, Six For KC What are the prospects of reclaiming systematic schooling so it serves the general welfare? Surely the possibility of recharging the system when so many seem to desire such a course would be the best refutation of my buried thesis—that no trustworthy change is possible, that the school machine must be shattered into a hundred thousand parts before the pledges made in the founding documents of this country have a chance to be honored again. No one serves better as an emblem of the hopelessness of a gradual course of school reform or one that follows...

May 3 is National Teacher Day, a day for honoring teachers and recognizing the lasting contributions they make to our lives. While it does take a lot of people to make a school succeed, this day focuses on the teachers who work to make public schools great places for students to succeed in life. It is celebrated on the Tuesday of the first full week of May, so the actual date varies each year. We especially dedicate this day to those teachers who are serving in the U.S. military forces. We all wish them a safe and speedy return. The...

I Quit, I Think In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century during my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district, crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while I was on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating...