An Underground History of American Education: SMG Edition
February 17, 2011
Who is John Taylor Gatto?
John Taylor Gatto was Teacher of the Year for both New York City and the entire state of New York. He left public schools in spectacular fashion by delivering his acceptance speech for the award(s), “Why Schools Don’t Educate” and writing an essay for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “I Quit, I Think.”
About the “Sprout Means Grow Edition“
All of these works are available free (legally) on the Internet. I’ve simply compiled – in addition to the main book, An Underground History of American Education – the articles and lectures below. They are not public domain but are distributed without charge on the condition they stay that way. I simply combined them into one PDF adding some snazzy navigation and designing the cover (because I couldn’t find a copy of the actual cover at an appropriate resolution).
- A Curriculum Beyond Money
- Invitation to an Open Conspiracy: The Bartleby Project. An excerpt from Weapons of Mass Instruction.
- Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids and Why. Harper’s, Sep 2003.
- Institutional Schooling Must Be Destroyed. Excerpt from Five Hundred Ways to Make America Better (George Magazine and Villard/Random House)
- Personal Solutions, Family Solutions from Natural Life Magazine, Sep/Oct 1995
- A Short, Angry History of American Forced Schooling. Speech to the Vermont Homeschooling Conference.
- The Six Lesson Schoolteacher from the Fall 1991 issue of Whole Earth Review.
- The Public School Nightmare: Why Fix a System Designed to Destroy Individual Thought? from the Diablo Valley School website
- The Tyranny of Compulsory Schooling. A speech, written August 26, 2005 and delivered at the University of Texas in Austin and reprinted in The Sun.
- What really Matters from Natural Life Magazine, November/December, 1994
- Why Schools Don’t Educate. Acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year on January 31, 1990.
About Sprout: Why I Assembled These Works
My undergraduate education was, for the most part, a miserable fifteen or so years. Working full time at day jobs that paid more than full-time night jobs meant I couldn’t take most of the interesting classes which meant I wouldn’t have an interesting major. My bittersweet graduation concluded one of those “finish your degree in a year” night-school programs populated (mostly) by adults more interested in a degree than an education. You “apply” (as if schools like this ever reject anyone) and choose from a list of mind-numbingly boring majors the one which sucks the least.
One of them was Education. I did not choose Education – despite harboring a lifelong dream of teaching – because everything I knew about education programs was toxic and I didn’t think I could suffer through the classes long enough to survive.
I am a teaching junkie, however and found that by evolving from a reporter to a technical writer, I could feed the teaching monkey on my back. I soon discovered fellow geeks scored their teaching fixes writing tutorials on the Internet and I lived happily for some time as a trainer and e-learning developer. Eventually, this led to a company specializing in developing online learning for universities (real schools with real campuses) with blended and online programs. The benefits, for the most part, are at least average with one in particular that stands above the rest – 100% tuition assistance (and 50% for books & materials). No restrictions on courses of study and grad school is included.
I felt suffering through a Master’s in Education was possible if I didn’t have to pay for the pain.
Required reading for my very first class included The End of Education by Neil Postman. This was, much to my pleasant surprise, not the sort of material I expected to endure. An equally enthusiastic classmate and kindred soul – also reeling from surprise and excitement – highly recommended John Taylor Gatto and the rest is … well, read for yourself.
Grad school still isn’t all sunshine and dandelions, but my hopes and dreams are renewed.
Finally, I can say again – I want be a teacher when I grow up.
