Restoring Education, Healing Children, Creating Citizens

Featuring John Taylor Gatto
11/06/2006

Position(s) nominated for:
Education 

Link to Bio:
Click here
Education Secretary nominee John Taylor Gatto is a passionate advocate for education reform. A schoolteacher for thirty years, and a multi-year recipient of New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year Awards, His celebrated books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, The Exhausted School, A Different Kind of Teacher, and The Underground History of American Education.

Nationwide there has been discussion for decades about our failing public education system - low standardized test scores, teacher shortages, crowded classrooms, school budget crises, crumbling school buildings, dangerous playgrounds, illiterate untrained young adults, and more. Politicians have felt compelled to address this issue, even if the results are harmful and merely symbolic (such as the No Child Left Behind Act). Many parents have sought alternative education opportunities for their children such as school voucher plans, charter schools, homeschooling, parochial schools, and costly, often homogeneous independent schools. Other families do not have the luxury of seeking alternative education settings for their children.

John Taylor Gatto is a leading voice for change, describing compulsory schooling as a "catastrophe." Gatto reminds us that public education in this country was "deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace 'manageable.' " (quote from Against Schools article by Gatto, Harperýs Magazine, 2003 - read the article)

Have public schools succeeded in their original purpose? If so, what does Gatto propose Americans do for our children instead? What do our young people really need to know to create abundant lives for themselves, for both survival and for meaningful community building in the 21st century?

For this Conversation, John Taylor Gatto explored possible solutions to these troubling questions about American schooling.

--Diane Wittner, CoProducer