The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

The Underground History of American Education

John Taylor Gatto

Published 2003

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ / 5

The Foundations of Schooling

Gatto delves deeply into the historical setting for forced schooling.

Here are some highlights:  

Modern schooling..."set out to build a new social order at the beginning of the twentieth century (and by 1970 had succeeded beyond all expectations), but in the process it crippled the democratic experiment of America, disenfranchising ordinary people, dividing families, creating wholesale dependencies, grotesquely extending childhoods.  It emptied people of full humanity in order to convert them to human resources."

"...correctly managed mass schooling would result in a population so dependent on leaders that schism and revolution would be things of the past.  The trick was to alienate children from themselves so they couldn't turn inside for strength, to alienate them from their families, religions, cultures, etc., so that no countervailing force could intervene."

Keep in mind that these ideas were concocted in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but you can plainly see how they have since come to fruition. 

The author makes the case that great thinkers of the past influenced those who were now working to create the utopia I spoke of in Part I.  The family must be destroyed, individuals must learn to depend on others (the State), and they must have burden-free lives.  Meanwhile, the idea of artificial wants was being created to make way for overproduction and commercial mass entertainment.

Chapter 8 is dedicated to the history of the coal industry in America and its role in changing our culture and funding mass schooling.  For what purpose does the coal industry have in schools?  Gatto goes into great depth to explain why and how it happened.  He says,

"...American government and big business (coal) had been fully committed...to creating and maintaining mass society."

The author calls it "a coal-fired mass mind." 

Here are some of the changes made slowly into national schooling:

1. Removal of literacies of writing and speaking which enable individuals to link up and persuade others.
2. Destruction of the narrative of American history...defining what makes Americans different from others.
3. Substitution of historical "social studies" catalogue of facts in place of historical narrative.
4. Radical dilution of academic content of formal curriculum which familiarized students with serious literature, philosophy, theology, etc.
5. Replacement of academics with a balanced-diet concept of humanities as substance of the school day.
6. Enlargement of school day and year to blot up outside opportunities to acquire useful knowledge leading to independent livelihoods; ie. shop classes.
7. Shifting oversight from those who have greatest interest in student development - parents, community, students - to strangers.
8. Relentless low-level hostility toward religious interpretations of meaning.

And this quote I found interesting from Zbigniew Brzezinski in his bookBetween Two Ages, published in 1970:

"It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files containing even the most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen, in addition to the more customary data.  These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.  Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information."

(Obamacare comes to mind.  Obamacare was never about healthcare anyway, just like schooling was never about education).

One last quote from the John Taylor Gatto is this: 

"Here is the crux of the difference between education and schooling - the former turns on independence, knowledge, ability, comprehension, and integrity; the latter upon obedience."

In Part I of The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, the author considers what education "used to be."  Education focused on duty, hard work, responsibility, and self-reliance. 

"Young people in America were expected to make something of themselves, not to prepare themselves to fit into a pre-established hierarchy.  Every foreign commentator notes the early training in independence, the remarkable precocity of American youth, and their assumption of adult responsibility."

"Anyone worthy of citizenship was expected to be able to think clearly and to welcome great responsibility."

But there was, from the onset of the birth of our nation, an attack on Western ideals.  These ideas began to creep into our culture very slowly until the post-Civil War period and just in time for the Industrial Revolution.  One goal was to create a school environment that destroyed creativity, independence, and hope, frankly.  If a large portion of the masses could be forced into this new way of thinking, this would help build upon the new utopia that man has always strived to reach. 

School was the easiest way to implement these ideas.  But this is dangerous because

"Utopian schooling is never about learning in the traditional sense; it's about the transformation of human nature."

"To mandate outcomes centrally would be a major step in the destruction of Western identity."

But it has happened already.  According to the author, by the 1960's this long push for forced schooling had done its job.  Human nature has been changed.  

One concept was to extend childhood and alleviate early responsibility.  Keep young people in school longer and create an atmosphere where they believe they (and their peers) are not capable of self-governance or independence. 

Another idea was to eliminate real books and how we read them.  Hello, textbooks?  Real books force us to think.

"Real books transport us to an inner realm of solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs can't.  Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy."

"Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education in its more fundamental civilized sense."

"Reading teaches nothing more important than the state of mind in which you find yourself absolutely alone with the thoughts of another mind, a matchless form of intimate raport available only to those with the ability to block out distraction and concentrate.  Hence the urgency of reading well if you read for power."

One more great quote from the author about reading:  (I love this!)

"Once you trust yourself to go mind-to-mind with great intellects, artists, scientists, warriors, and philosophers, you are finally free." 

That's just two points, but there are so many more packed into Part I; you will have to read it for yourself.  The bottom line is this: the author makes the case that

"...government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-self exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community."

I cannot say anymore, but I will return with Part II later.  For now, consider this:

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct.  Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy..." 

Now, ask yourself if schools today provide that to young people? 

Everyone should read this book!  Whether you homeschool, are thinking of homeschooling, have kids in public school, are a teacher or work within the education system, and anybody else.  This is an inside look at one teacher's long experience within the American public education system. The teacher, John Taylor Gatto, candidly retells his story, some of which will seem unbelievable, and others that will make you remember your own experience in public school. You may have to agree.

Gatto worked as a public school teacher for about thirty years in the New York City area, and was named Teacher of the Year for three consecutive years.

Here is my summary of the Prologue: America was a nation that prided itself on independence, individualism, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and resourcefulness.  Americans, no matter how poor, understood they could become their own master; they would have to in order to feed themselves and their families.

Some time after the Civil War and the start of the Industrial Revolution, some of those wealthy, elite, powerful men who had become their own masters, understood the need for mass production and workers willing to give up their own freedoms for the good of all, and hence, forced mass schooling was born.  One hundred years later, Americans do not think of their individualism like our fore fathers had.  We think about going to school in order to get a job and work for someone else.  Our independent spirit has been snuffed out.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the Prologue:

"...modern schooling...the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting.  You have no say at all in choosing your [child's] teacher."  (At least you may know how difficult it is to do so. - my opinion.)

"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history.  It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents."

"How much more evidence is necessary?  Good schools don't need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and run risks.  We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either.  Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it."

"Exactly what John Dewey heralded...has indeed happened.  Our one highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant.  The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings.  Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed.  Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion.  All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling."

"School is a religion...Dewey's Pedagogic Creed...gives you a clue to the zeitgeist:"

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.  In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

"Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life.  Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age.  Maturity was to be retarded."

"Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teachers is dumbness."

"What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves..."

You can read The Underground History of American Education online for free.

I know these are super long posts - this one and all of the Underground History posts - but I could not cut out anymore because the message is so essential to all of us.  If you want to understand our history, our influences, our culture and civilizations, the direction we are headed as a nation, and what we can do to change it, you have got to read this book.  

Here is only a short synopsis of the final part:

Nothing good can come from inviting global corporations to design our schools, any more than leaving a hungry dog to guard ham sandwiches is a good way to protect lunch.

Modern schooling is a battle between the needs of social machinery and the needs of the human spirt. In other words, government schooling has basically forfeited a young person's natural desire and ability to create, problem solve, build, learn, discover, and thrive for something else: the corporate, social agenda and the "better good" of the State.

A price had to be paid: the trade off was "the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck."

It was never a conspiracy. 

In fact, it was a reasoned undertaking engineered by very respectable men, but with help from ordinary citizens who bought into it, and who forgot how to be leaders, choosing rather to be consumers instead of producers.

This may sound unbelievable, but those in power tend to fear the education of the common man. Americans were once well-read, but schools had a new interest to train up children for "their role in the new overarching social system."  That included the end of reading as we once knew it.

"There are many ways to burn books without a match":

1. Substitute childish books for serious ones

2. Simplify language, so that it becomes demeaning

3. Fill books with pictures to replace imagination

(Have you examined a school's reading "program," lately?)

Gatto believes in people, especially children:

...people love to invent solutions, to be resourceful, to make do with what they have, but resourcefulness and frugality are criminal behaviors to a mass production economy...

Worst of all are those who yearn for productive, independent livelihoods like...nearly all free Americans once had.  If that vision spreads, a consumer economy is sunk.  

...the form of schooling we get is largely a kind of consumer and employee training.  

How to break out of the trap:

1. debate the purpose of public education;
2. challenge elites who set the agenda;
3. withhold allegiance from political and economic leadership;
4. trust ourselves and our children to remake the future locally;
5. demand  intellectual and character development as the mission in schools; and
6. smash the government monopoly of funds.

Here is a dilemma: 

Modern schooling has no lasting value to exchange for the spectacular chunk of living time it wastes or the possibilities it destroys.

Universal prescriptions are the problem of modern schooling, academic research which pursues the will-o-the-wisp of average children and average stages of development makes for destructive social policy, it is a sea anchor dragging against advancement, creating the problem it begs for money to solve.

How to change the schools we have:

1. take profit out of reading and math specialists, including publishers and materials suppliers;
2. do not exceed a few hundred students per school;
3. measure performance with individualized instruments;
4. end the district school boards;
5. install permanent parent facilities in every school;
6. give children private time and space;
7. understand there is no one right way to grow up successfully;
8. teach children to think dialectically; and
9. arrange schooling around complex themes instead of subjects.

An important truth about school vs. education:

Schools can never deal with really important things.  Only education can teach us that quests don't always work, that even worthy lives most often end in tragedy, that money can't prevent this; that failure is a regular part of the human condition; that you will never understand evil; that serious pursuits are almost always lonely; that you can't negotiate love; the money can't buy much that matters; that happiness is free.

The best lives are full of contemplation, full of solitude, full of self-examination, full of private, personal attempts to engage the metaphysical mystery of existence, to create an inner life.

Part III is a chapter about the author's youth and experience growing up and teaching.  Here are some of my favorite quotes:

Poverty can't make you miserable; only a bad character and a weak spirit can do that.

Nobody should be allowed to teach until they get to be forty years old.  No one should be allowed anywhere near kids without having known grief, challenge, success, failure, and sadness.

Millions of retired people would make fine teachers.  College degrees aren't a good way to hire anybody to do anything.

The idea that individuals have free will which supersedes any social programming is anathema to the very concept of forced schooling.

Part IV explores corporate domination on American education.  Wealthy, influential foundations, like Rockefeller's and Carnegie's, poured money into funding government schooling, (just like Bill Gates' Foundation).  Has anyone ever asked what Bill Gates knows about education? (See this current article about why Gates is wrong about Common Core - the current universal curriculum push.)  The more money wealthy foundations put into education, the more obligated the system is to their demands.

Gatto says,

" - corporate wealth...has advanced importantly the dumbing down of America's schools, the creation of a scientific class system, and the important attacks on family integrity, national identification, religious rights, and national sovereignty."

The author probes the psychology associated with forced schooling.  Behaviorists believed humans were machines; stage theorists treated humans like vegetables - hence Kindergarten, but neither treated children like people.  Gatto asks, "Are children empty vessels?...Is human nature empty?  If it is, who claims a right to fill it?"

This is the basic hypothesis of utopia-building, that the structure of personhood can be broken and reformed again and again for the better.

Gatto addresses the elimination of failure, morality, and God. 

...a plan to eliminate failure structurally from formal schooling was considered and endorsed - failure could be eliminated if schools were converted into laboratories of life adjustment and intellectual standards were muted.

...the only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong. 

Spiritually-minded people cannot be controlled.  The Western Christian ideals must be replaced by the New Religion of Science that teaches:

1. Criticism of parents, community, and traditional values
2. Objectivity and suppression of human feelings
3. Neutrality
4. Only that which is visible can be known

The religion of science says there is no sin; no good or evil; no free will; no redemption; work is for fools; hard work is for slaves; and work as little as you can get away with.  It also says YOU CANNOT TRUST YOURSELF; but you can trust the State to make the best decision for you. 

All this is coming true today!

The author states that the way to fix the problem with schools is to "return to discipleship in education."  This involves a return to "apprenticeships and mentorships which mostly involve self-education."

They are self-taught through the burdens of having to work, having to sort out right from wrong, having to check your appetites, and having to age and die.

Western spirituality granted every single individual a purpose for being alive.

...everyone counts...What constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, acceptance of aging and loss,preparation for death...You do it for yourself.  It's time to teach these things to our children once again. 

Finally, the last chapter of Part IV covers more psychology of schooling and what its end result has been.  Gatto says, "School wreaks havoc on human foundations in...eight substantive ways so deeply buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any other way for children to grow up."

Schools teach:

1. Forgetfulness
2. Bewilderment and confusion
3. Children are assigned to social classes
4. Indifference
5. Emotional dependency
6. Intellectual dependency
7. Provisional self-esteem
8. The glass house effect: there is no privacy or privacy is a crime

Hence, schools produce children...

1. indifferent to the adult world of values and accomplishment
2. with almost no curiosity
3. with a poor sense of the future
4. who lack compassion for misfortune
5. who can't stand intimacy or frankness
6. who are materialistic
7. who are dependent and grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified, dependent adults passive and timid in the face of new challenges.

You can read the entire text for yourself at  The Underground History of American Education online for free.