Dumbing Us Down By John Taylor Gatto (1992)

Review by Donald Clark

Most parents have a sneaky suspicion that schools are hopelessly old-fashioned and deeply dysfunctional, but don’t quite know why. John Taylor Gatto was a teacher for 30 years and one of the top teachers in the US. He won numerous Best Teacher awards, but he left, seeing the whole system of public education as a failure.

Slow death

He sets out to show that schools are not really ‘community’ or ‘family’ focused. The fact that school is ‘set apart’ from the community and world in which students live means that school is a 13 year jail sentence. Confinement is their aim and a sort of ‘slow death’ ensues. It’s the bells, boredom, lack of privacy, constant surveillance, the mindless competition, warehousing, the enforced stratification and lack of engagement that does the damage. Then there’s the inevitable shaming, embarrassment, harassment, brutalisation and harm done to most children when they’re packed in too tightly for too long in an institution with their peers.

Lessons of bells

As a teacher he saw that most of what is taught is hopelessly out of context. Then there’s the artificiality of the age segregation. School, in this sense, is a revolt against all sense of natural behaviour and order. The teaching is a fragmented, patchwork quilt of disorder, the opposite of cohesion. The substitute teachers who baby-sit classes do further damage. “The lessons of bells are that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.” This all promotes emotional and intellectual dependence, not autonomy. The curriculum produces a sort of moral, physical and intellectual paralysis.

Graded like vegetables

And the educational system sees the solution to failed schools as ‘more schooling’; extended days, extended compulsory ages, more homework, tutors, summer schools. What does this mean? Simply that more children will fail. Schools are, in this sense, a sorting mechanism where they are graded like vegetables.

No one survives with humanity intact

“No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, not parents (parents are usually considered adversaries).” Schools separate children from their parents, and then blame the family for any problems that arise! Gatto is really on to something here. Schools are hopeless in dealing with parents.

Solutions?

His solution is to abandon the idea of compulsory public education. For Gatto, schools are structurally unreformable. No amount of tinkering will fix the system. Institutions forget their goals and see survival and growth as their aim. Synthetic leaders see themselves responsible for synthetic children. He recommends community service and more realistic, out-of-school learning. The ‘family curriculum’ is his focus with a more naturalistic approach to education. What he doesn’t do is say how this should be structured.