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John Taylor Gatto

1935 – 2018 American schoolteacher, author, critic of compulsory schooling

Award-winning New York teacher who quit to attack compulsory schooling, arguing in books like Dumbing Us Down that mass education is designed to produce obedience rather than free minds.

Affiliations
New York City public schools

John Taylor Gatto taught in New York City public schools for about thirty years and was named New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, then resigned with a public essay saying he no longer wished to harm children. In Dumbing Us Down (1992) and The Underground History of American Education he argued that modern compulsory schooling was built to manufacture conformity, dull curiosity, and produce compliant workers and consumers. Central to his case is the claim that American schooling copied a nineteenth-century Prussian model meant to make obedient subjects, and that industrial philanthropists such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations backed mass schooling to serve those ends. These are Gatto's polemical arguments rather than settled history, and historians dispute parts of them, but they made him a leading voice for homeschooling and unschooling.

Works in the library

Connections

  • rival of Horace Mann — Gatto argued that Mann's Prussian-inspired common school helped build a system of enforced conformity; this is his critique, not a settled reading of Mann.
  • rival of John D. Rockefeller — Gatto argued the Rockefeller General Education Board and Carnegie money promoted mass schooling to produce a compliant workforce; this is a contested claim of his.
  • rival of John Dewey — Gatto's attack on institutional schooling reached back to the progressive tradition Dewey helped shape.

In the timeline

Wikipedia