John Taylor Gatto, an educational rebel and advocate of
"unschooling," died last week. We lost a great and
vigorous voice for liberty.
John
had been a schoolteacher in New York City for 21 years; had been named the
city's teacher of the year during his last three years of teaching, 1989-91;
and was N.Y. State teacher of the year in 1991. He refused to
divulge his great success as a teacher, keeping the doors of his classrooms
closed as he stopped teaching the kids, letting them become
"unschooled," which meant breaking the mold of being
controlled. Instead, he let them do what they wanted – talk and ask
any question. After six months of unschooling, almost all of them
started asking questions about stuff that they wanted to know about and finding
answers on their own, understanding for the first time their involvement in the
gaining and enjoyment of learning.
In
1991, Gatto retired, writing a famous letter to the Wall Street Journal stating
that he no longer wished "to hurt kids to make a
living." Thereafter, he advocated homeschooling and spoke out
against factory schools. John ran for state Senate in
N.Y. as a conservative and served as the shadow minister for education with the
Libertarian Party.
I
spoke with him at some length about 25 years ago, when he appeared on a local
talk radio show hosted by Bill, the progressive (of course) on the local NPR
affiliate. Bill had invited John, either not knowing what he stood
for or possibly fantasizing that he could belittle John to please his Michigan
Education Association masters.
The
first caller was one of our kids' English teachers, whom I will call
Sally. She made claims about City Middle and High School in Grand
Rapids that made it sound as though all the public schools ran at the same
elevated level as that unique school.
I
had read some of John's books and had a cassette tape of one of his lectures
running continuously in my car, prepared to rumble. I got on next,
informing the audience that City is a "pull out school" to which the brightest two or three
percent of kids in Grand Rapids public schools are admitted. The
lowest IQ was probably 115, and the students were mostly the children of
professionals. My disparaging the test results was a kind of dog
whistle for John, who started egging me on, basically interviewing me, knowing
that I would use his language.
Poor
Bill, our host, sputtered and could not cut in.
We
rapped nonstop for the rest of the half-hour segment, covering all of
John's themes:
that the public schools and schooling in general evolved from the 1807
Prussian model designed to turn smart farm kids into factory workers, good
soldiers, and obedient subjects of their rulers. Our public
schooling was designed by social engineers like Horace Mann and John Dewey to
destroy their young pupils' minds, to impose their depending on authority and
stifle questioning and reasoning about the real world so that these well
trained automatons could live in the wonderful world they
envisioned. School routines and drills crowded out the time young
people needed to wonder about stuff outside school and to find their own way in
life – in other words, they didn't have time to educate themselves.
Gatto,
citing Plato, talked about education as that inward look, a drawing out from
some subconscious human reservoir that each of us has, to find the meaning of
life, asking questions like, Is there a God? What do I want to do
for a living? Is this good poetry?
What's
the punchline of this reminiscence? Our host Bill was fired two
weeks later. A technician at the station told me the MEA was unhappy
about his inability or unwillingness to stop dissemination of the wrong kind of
propaganda on its NPR station.
Erwin Haas was an Army flight surgeon in Vietnam, a Kentwood city
commissioner, and an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Michigan
State. He is running as a Libertarian for Michigan's 26th state
senate district. He blogs here.