John Taylor Gatto: Unlikely Guerrilla
The award-winning public school teacher and hero of home schoolers was a gentle, brilliant subversive who did all he could to free kids from the prison of America's system of schooling
In the early 1990s when my wife Trudi and I home schooled our three kids I discovered the great John Taylor Gatto. Born in Washington County south of Pittsburgh, where we were living, Gatto, a libertarian, was becoming famous as a ‘Johnny Apple Seed’ of home schooling, un-schooling and charter schools. His best-selling book ‘Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling’ was an all-out attack on the harm public schooling does to the minds and souls of children from a man who won awards teaching in them for three decades. It came out in 1991.
Here’s a quote:
I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
~John Taylor Gatto
I wrote the feature article below for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1993. Gatto died in 2018. Here’s an interview with him toward the end of his life. Here’s my feature article on him from 1993.
John Taylor Gatto — a brilliant subversive
August 22, 1993
The secret of my success as a teacher was that I primarily taught children, a) that they must be saboteurs and b), how to get away with it.
— John Taylor Gatto
Philadelphia, 1993
John Taylor Gatto doesn't look much like a revolutionary.
With his bulky fisherman's vest over a button-down blue shirt and striped tie, and with one moccasin lace untied, he doesn't exactly appear to be a threat to the American way of life.
Actually, he seems a little disorganized, almost confused, as he struggles with the thick sheaf of papers that contains the handwritten lecture he'll deliver to about 75 educators and children's reading experts from around the world.
Leaning his 6-foot-2, 200-something-pound body over the microphone, he looks up, smiles, and says, "I'm terrified by people who know what they're doing."
Yeah, right.
As if the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year and forever loyal son of the rusting river town of Monongahela south of Pittsburgh doesn't know exactly what he's up to.
After nearly 29 award-winning years as an innovative teacher in Manhattan's best and worst schools, Gatto, at age 57, has evolved into a one-man intellectual insurgency.
He's a turncoat teacher who’s writing assumption-rattling books and running around the country trying to undermine America's $400-billion-a-year educational system. He's written op-ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal and appeared on the McNeil-Lehrer "NewsHour" and PBS specials. His small book Dumbing Us Down has sold nearly 40,000 copies in less than a year.
Gatto’s given nearly 100 lectures and addresses like the one he'll give today at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. And he always makes the same Big Point: It is high time for America to radically transform its 150-year-old system of compulsory state schooling.
He says our system of mass education is a sick institution that can never work, never be reformed. As a modern copy of the military-minded Prussian school system of the early 1800s, its nature remains inherently "mechanical, anti-human and hostile to family life."
Gatto's sweeping critique evolved slowly over the last 20 years. It's a synthesis of ideas he found in his readings of history and philosophy and of lessons he learned as a boy in Monongahela and as a teacher of rich and poor 13-year-old New Yorkers.
School, he says, is "a 12-year jail sentence" that "monopolizes the best times of childhood." It is a psychopathic institution that steals valuable time away from family life and "doesn't teach anything except how to obey orders."
What's worse, he says, by locking children away from the rest of society for most of their youth, we perpetuate childishness and prevent them from learning vitally important "lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life."
***
As a teacher who disdained tests, grades and subverted nearly every other school convention he could get away with, Gatto was an unlikely award-winner. He attributes his entire success not to what he put into his students' heads, but to his ability to get himself and the school out of their way.
The Big Bang that launched Gatto's new career occurred the night he was presented with the 1990 New York City Teacher of the Year award. Instead of the forgettable acceptance speech they'd come to expect at such ceremonial affairs, the audience was stunned into silence.
"For 140 years," Gatto told them in a speech titled "The Psychopathic School," "this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of 'experts,' a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment."
Incredibly, despite that indictment, the next year the New York Senate named him the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year. This time he thanked them with a speech called "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher."
Again the turncoat teacher blasted the "mess of government monopoly schooling." Then he told them the only solution is to develop a free market in education, where "family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education."
He also explained what it was that he and his fellow teachers were really teaching students: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem and the fact that you can't ever hide or have any private time to yourself.
Meanwhile, Gatto's life had changed.
His "Psychopathic School" speech of the previous year had been reprinted in nearly 500 papers, magazines and newsletters. He was getting 150 letters a month. TV news and documentary crews were following him around, and he had already started writing three new books on America's system of schooling.
He had struck a national nerve-ending, and people were clamoring for him to come and speak to their groups. When he realized that the school district would never fulfill its promise to allow him to run a whole school using the "Guerrilla Curriculum" he had devised (see below), he resigned as a public school teacher.
Two years later, Gatto is working just as hard at his new career as he did teaching.
In the last 18 months he's delivered his message in more than 120 cities and towns from Boise to Bath, Maine. He's held workshops for the public school teachers of Cody, Wyoming. He's conducted graduate seminars on education and spent a week with Apple Computer's research and development wizards. He got up at 6 a.m. to drive from his New York City apartment to give today's talk. He won't head for home until almost 5:30 p.m.
***
Gatto's a bundle of complexities. He's a radical conservative with a serious libertarian streak who despises experts, trusts the common people and served as his school's union representative. An intellectual who relates to 13-year-olds. A vicious iconoclast who values families, hard work, self-discipline and the importance of having a clear sense of good and evil.
Despite his incendiary ideas, in person Gatto is pleasant, friendly, gentle. There's nothing stuffy or arrogant about him. He's as eager to discuss important Pittsburgh sports issues as school troubles.
He's basically your Italian-German American Uncle Jack from Monongahela. Except that he was invited to the Bush White House twice because of his noisy advocacy of school choice plans. And except that he can spend an hour tracing the philosophical lineage of our system of mass schooling from Locke to Rousseau to Prussia's military leaders to Horace Mann to Andrew Carnegie to the Department of Education for you.
Gatto, who has two grown children, has lived his last 37 years in Manhattan, but he still always proudly identifies himself as a Pittsburgher. "What I learned in Pittsburgh," he says with true fondness, "is that it's closer than anything to the way people ought to live."
In an essay in Dumbing Us Down about how he came to be a teacher, Gatto wrote that the Monongahela River and everyone who lived in town were his teachers.
His Grandfather Zimmer — a German Republican printer in an Italian Democrat town — taught him to always stand and fight for what he believed in. And his mother, Frances, who took him on 10-mile walks and taught him to read as he sat on her lap, turned him into a lifelong lover of nature and books.
Gatto went to college at Cornell, Pitt and Columbia, where he picked up a master's degree in English literature. Then he became a hot-shot Madison Avenue advertising copy writer. He was 29 and on the fast track to making big New York money writing 30-second TV spots, when he shocked his co-workers by quitting to become a substitute junior high school teacher.
He wanted a meaningful job, not more money and cocktail parties. At first the rookie teacher was terribly disappointed by everything he found, but he stuck it out. Slowly he saw it was the school structure itself that was the problem. It was driving kids crazy, killing their natural curiosity and stifling their ability to think or act on their own.
Slowly he devised ways to sabotage the system he worked for. For example, one of the things that drove him mad was the way a school day was fragmented into 45-minute periods.
"Breaking time into even particles is a disaster," he says, "because it teaches quickly that nothing is more important than anything else, that nothing is worth finishing. And as soon as nothing's worth finishing, it's a very short leap to nothing's worth beginning. It's insane that perfectly sensible people don't see that."
Gatto saw it right away and decided to remedy it. He began "bending the bars of the cage," working the system, gobbling up free periods, then "borrowing" blocks of class time from other teachers who quietly went along with the madman in their midst.
It wasn't long before Gatto had a master key and was dispatching his kids to do projects in empty rooms all over the school. He had vastly expanded the scope of a mere classroom English teacher, and it was working.
"I was getting phenomenal results for the kids, and I would use 'phenomenal' in this respect: They were beginning to use their own particular perspective and intelligence and historical background to see things I couldn't see."
One of Gatto's earliest eighth graders was Roland Legiardi-Laura. Now an award-winning documentary filmmaker in New York City, he says Gatto's teaching methods were much more traditional in 1966, but he was already someone special.
"He was able to impart in us a sense that we had a tremendous power over our ability to learn and create with what we learned. His presence was empowering. He freed up those energies. Traditional teachers give you the idea that they're passing on knowledge that they deign to give you. Gatto's idea was that what was out there you could get yourself."
In the early 1980s, Gatto told anyone who'd listen that there is no secret to creating self-reliant, self-teaching students. He was producing 65 of them in a year, at virtually no cost, with lots of understanding, energy and guts.
But he began to wonder if his methods only worked with privileged kids. To find out, he got himself transferred to a school of rich, poor and middle-class kids whom the school system had branded emotionally disturbed. "They were emotionally disturbed because they were locked up all day," he adds with a laugh. His methods worked wonders there too.
So in the early 1980s, he asked for a transfer to Booker T. Washington Junior High School.
On the edge of Harlem, it ranked among the 59 worst schools in the state. It was 60-40 black and Latino students and only about a third of them came from intact families. Among its alumni are seven of the nine Central Park Jogger's rapists.
Gatto's unorthodox, rule-breaking methods — which he had dubbed his "Guerrilla Curriculum" — worked there too. It took longer, but not because of the students.
"I had a very difficult time," Gatto explains, "because in a school with poor kids, the staff and administration become inured to their failures. They don't believe the kids can do anything.”
By the end of the 1980s, his kids from Harlem and East Harlem were out of the school building on their own every Friday. He and the kids and their parents signed a contract and sealed it with a handshake. Gatto's students worked for printers and hospitals and apprenticed themselves to comic book artists.
Gatto had perfected his "Guerrila Curriculum."
"It took a much longer time for the poorer kids at Booker T. Washington to actually believe that someone was going to let them learn the way they learned. But as soon as they believed that — I'd say in 90 days — one after another, they passed through the same transformation I had witnessed with the eclectic group and the rich. They became their own teachers."
It’s a wonder that Gatto won New York City Teacher of the Year awards in 1989, 1990, and 1991 and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Yet despite Gatto’s openly subversive activities and attacks on the public school system, the superintendent of Gatto's school district, Anton Klein, never had a problem with Gatto, personally, professionally or politically.
"He's quite a maverick," he said from New York City. "He was a very interesting and effective teacher. He cared about kids. He got along with the building principal and ran an effective program."
***
Gatto says there's a real educational revolution occurring at the grass roots. As evidence of how far along it is, he points to estimates that 1 million children now are being schooled at home by their parents, a 50-fold increase in the last 15 years.
He's become a huge fan of the home schooling movement and “unschooling,” which he says pose the greatest long-term threat to "systematic schooling." But Gatto's no dreamer. He knows he'll never see a radical transformation of schooling in his lifetime. It's too politically powerful and too economically important.
In the short run, he sees choice plans being implemented widely, school districts being decentralized and de-bureaucratized, more computers in classrooms and national testing — an idea he loathes. But these developments and others like the Outcome Based Education program that will probably become law in Pennsylvania this fall are only so much tinkering.
At times it'll look like the answer has been found, he says, "but the answer was found 100 years ago. The answer is in writing your own script for your life, having a strong family and having sources of private meaning that can only come from work and religion and culture and loyalty to Pittsburgh. My mother taught me that."
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The Guerrilla Curriculum
John Gatto touts his "Guerrilla Curriculum" as a cost-free method to restore primary experience and intellectual quality to school. Its principles include:
Assuming that talent and genius are abundant.
Using fully adult language at all times.
Filling the working environments with democratic procedures.
Insisting on the highest standards in academic and intellectual performance.
Having a personal relationship with each student and each student's family.
Emphasizing respect, tangible outputs, humanity over curriculum, curriculum over technique, experience over theory and the quality of character over the quality of intellect.
In practice, it means such things as substantial community service, apprenticeships, parent partnerships on school time, team projects, workstudy programs and plenty of time for solitude. Plus, mentorships, improvisational play in groups without guidance and maximum flexibility in scheduling classes, choosing textbooks and using school time and space.
Hi! I am currently a history biography paper on Gatto and his ideas. Did you have access to the newspaper article through the Gazzete that I can cite as a primary source of the time?
Thank you!
Good article! I just read The Underground History and he mentioned that he was going to write a book called The Guerrilla Curriculum. I can’t locate a copy. Do you know if he ever wrote it?