John Taylor Gatto .com
website has much of his efforts to inform on and correct the damage done by the government school system. He passed away Oct 25, 2018. His books clearly define the problem with the USofA educational system. It is, unfortunately, by design. He recognized that after trying in vain to fix it from within.
If he wasn’t the single most important voice for freedom, good sense, and respect for children in education, he was certainly among the top three or four. Dead at 82.
Gatto spent nearly 30 years as a teacher in the infamously rough New York City public school system. He was awarded New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years while also being recognized as New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.
Over the course of his career, Gatto was recognized by other educators for the rapport he had built with his students. While other teachers were spending much of their day on behavioral management issues, Gatto’s students were actively engaged in his lectures and genuinely excited about learning. …
After three decades in the classroom, Gatto realized that the public school system was squashing individualism more than it was educating students and preparing them for the real world. To make matters worse, his later research would reveal that this dumbing down was not just by accident, but by design.
Feeling the education system was beyond repair, Gatto could no longer in good conscience be an active participant. Rather than sending his letter of resignation to his superiors in his school district, he sent a copy of “I Quit, I Think” to the Wall Street Journal, where it was published as an op-ed on July 25, 1991. …
Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system.
Lew Rockwell interviews John Taylor Gatto, August 24, 2010
Mr. Gatto quit as a public school teacher in order to stop harming kids. He had discovered that institutional schooling is designed to prevent the natural genius of children from emerging. Public schools impose a state of permanent incompletion to our kids, by teaching habit-training, not intellectual development. The power elite deliberately suppresses independent and critical thinking, to make us obedient citizens and consumers. Gatto, author of the best-selling Weapons of Mass Instruction, Dumbing Us Down, and The Underground History of American Education, discusses how the twenty elite boarding schools teach their students according to ancient principles, and homeschoolers and unschoolers are doing the same.