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...

Mr. Gatto (along with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt), blew the whistle on deliberate dumbing down (on the Prussian model, crushing the imagination of children because it caused them to lose to Napoleon). Mr. Gatto said that the children of the elites have no advantage over ghetto kids "who have never eaten off a tablecloth". The opposite: elite prep schools, the Groton, Brook, St. Albans, Episcopal High & Andover, produce the idiots who presume to rule us. (Thomas Sowell waxed eloquent about how stupid top experts are.) Point in fact (from Samuel Blumenfeld, "Crimes of the Educators"): John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded...

I was dumb in math, I only got an 86 on standardized testing (that Mr. Gatto says is only good to predict results on the next standardized test). But the thing that helped me eventually get an A in calculus, was that I saw these cool slide rules, so at 13 I taught myself logarithms. I had a book with tables. So, though a high school counselor put in the dumb chemistry, with the nursing students, I kept up doing simple, old, rote memorization drills: Thru Algegra 2 and into Math Analysis/College Math in 12th grade--I'm stupid--we didn't try to...

John Taylor Gatto was the champion teacher who blew the whistle on mis-education that by the perpetrators' own historical admission was designed to handicap students. Just google John Taylor Gatto videos to learn how bad it was, or look at a little website, improve-education.org , #45, The Crusade Against Knowledge-THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST MEMORY , then look half-way down, to see frank admissions from the villains who poisoned our children--our great-grandparents--ourselves. Why this happened is very complex, but Gatto toward the end of his life, revealed that between 1867-1800 when America was being forcefully converted from a nation of 97% self-employed...

Forced schooling turned out from the first to be a breeding ground for crime and public outrage, not the “best police” as promised. “As the twenty-first century begins its second decade, mass schooling is much as it was in 1910, at least for the poor and the ordinary. It is test-driven, bell-driven, pedagogue-dominated, and thoroughly dumbed down.” Let me give you an excerpt from a boys’ manual of instructions on how to build things, published in 1937. It was sold on newsstands as The Amateur Craftsman’s Cyclopedia of Things to Make and was expressly intended, as it states in print,...

If you have never heard of John Taylor Gatto, you should. I believe most FReepers will be smiling and nodding while listening to this speech. It's about an hour long. Bookmark it and schedule yourself an uninterrupted hour to listen. Audio only.

John and Ken are taking the show to Assemblyman Mike Gatto’s Burbank office today. We want you to show up with non-perishable items to help Mike Gatto out, since he’s whining about losing his pay. For example, Ken is bringing an old gift basket he can’t get rid of. John and Ken will be at Mike Gatto’s office today from 3-5 pm. You can listen to this event LIVE here: http://www.kfiam640.com/mediaplayer/?station=KFI-AM&action=listenlive&channel_title=

A fight broke out Wednesday on the Assembly floor as Assemblyman Warren Furutani confronted Assemblyman Don Wagner over comments deemed offensive. The two members jawed angrily in each other's faces before Furutani appeared to give Wagner a shove, prompting several colleagues to separate them in the final minutes of Wednesday's budget session. The dispute brought the house to a standstill for a couple minutes during debate over a controversial redevelopment plan. The two-bill proposal compels redevelopment agencies to backfill state coffers and give money to local governments under threat of elimination. Wagner, R-Irvine, testified that it was comparable to a...

Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like "gifted musician", "natural athlete" and "innate intelligence", we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't. But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes. A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors, always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea....

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...

Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed. Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the President; their job is...

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...

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested...

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...

An angry letter to the Atlantic Monthly in its January 1998 issue by Walter Greene of Hatboro, Pennsylvania, protested the "myth of our failing schools," as he called it, on these grounds: We just happen to have the world's most productive work force[sic], the largest standard of living, more Nobel [P]rizes than the rest of the world combined, the best system of higher education, the best high-tech medicine, and the strongest military. These things could not have been accomplished with second-rate systems of education. On the contrary, the surprising truth is they could not have been accomplished to the degree...