Every once in a while, I’ve flirted with the writings of John Taylor Gatto, but I’ve really never made a systematic study of them. I’d like to add that to my regimen in the coming weeks, now that I’ve wrapped up some other topics (to my satisfaction, anyway). I’ll probably do a bunch of smaller quotes of Gatto’s stuff, along with some hopefully bigger-picture applications of his ideas in a variety of different ways. Here’s a great quote from an article: Modern Education and the Mass-Marketing of Children. Gatto, in this section, is talking about the common reaction of most parents upon hearing that the public education system was designed to create docile workers. Their usual reaction goes something like:

“The kids have to know how to read and write, don’t they?” “They have to know how to add and subtract, don’t they?” “They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job.”

One of Gatto’s greatest strengths is that his work is firmly rooted in history - in the parts of American history that we don’t hear much about. Part of his response in this article draws upon that:

People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3 million, 20 percent of whom were slaves, and 50 percent indentured servants. Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn’t very hard. Pick up a fifth grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level.

More on this to follow. If anybody has good recommendations for Gatto articles online or thinking in this direction, drop ‘em here! Ah, one more piece from this article before I go:

We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built — then we would be so self-sufficient we would not need the material “sufficiency” which our global “experts” are so insistent we be concerned about.

Ah, I’m gonna shed a tear reading this…