A Conversation with John Taylor Gatto

When John Taylor Gatto quit teaching in 1991, after 26 years on the job in New York City, many spent in Harlem, he was the New York State Teacher of the Year. His resignation letter, printed by the Wall Street Journal, accused public schools of teaching “a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency.” For the past 10 years Gatto has toured the country and beyond, speaking out against a school system designed to create pliant consumer/citizens who blindly obey the subservient roles society assigns them. His books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and An Underground History of American Education.
Gatto will be speaking at the Sunwise School in New Paltz in May. The date has yet to be announced. For more information, call 255-4262.
I spoke with Gatto from his home in Manhattan in March.
—Brian K. Mahoney

Chronogram: You’re an outspoken critic of the public education system. What’s the fundamental problem?
John Taylor Gatto: The fundamental problem is [that] an institutional school can only school and their clientele and their sponsors expect an education to happen—but the two things are mutually exclusive. There’s some cousinage between them but a school can only school. It sounds like some semantic trick but in fact it requires the smallest amount of investigation to see what the difference is. Education is generated largely from the inside out; the seeker does 90 percent of the work and initiates 90 percent of the leads. A school is the imposition of what really amounts to a religious text. There’s very slight differences. Schools aren’t about reading, writing and arithmetic.
C: If schools are not about reading, writing and arithmetic, what’s going on inside those buildings all day?
JTG: They’re about creating a fit between the social order and the economy and the mass of the next generation. Schools don’t exist for the “policy classes.” There are different trials for them to go through. It’s exceedingly easy, with no money at all, to duplicate what elite, private boarding schools do. The difficulty is, we would have vast instability in the social order and the economy if that were done.
C: Why?
JTG: Here, take this fairly recent projection from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for the ten top occupations for the next decade. Here they are [reads from a piece of paper]: retail salesperson (that really means clerk at Wal-Mart), registered nurse, cashier, office clerk, truck driver, janitor and cleaner, domestic servants, orderlies/attendants, food counter-related workers, waitpersons. That’s the top ten minus one. Number six would be managers and executives, bosses and the boss. I’m not coming at this from a Marxist perspective. We’ve evolved a corporate economy that requires people to fit. The idea of having critical thinkers in any of these jobs is bizarre. You can’t have critical thinkers in a corporate economy.
C: How did we get to this present state with public schools in this country?
JTG: Well, it’s fascinating because it actually was calculated quite a long time ago. I don’t suspect very many people who are keeping the institution alive and well calculate much, other than when to pick up their paycheck and how to get rehired. [A change occurred] when the small craft, entrepreneurial farm economy gave way after the Civil War to a corporate economy. That was largely a process that was over by 1900. And then the farms themselves began to be corporatized and that process was certainly over by the end of the Second World War, probably long before that. When that happened, the need for the kind of Americans that we’ve preserved in romantic history was over. You needed a different kind of person. You needed incomplete people who fit. You needed specialists who were by definition incomplete people.
C: What do you mean by “specialists”?
JTG: People who will perform a function. And you can hire them, like Arthur Andersen, and they will perform an accounting function. They spend most of their time hanging out with accountants and most of their reading is keeping up on the latest accounting jargon. That’s what you hire them for. You don’t really care about their lives or their opinions.
Once the kind of completionist people that Jefferson or a Ben Franklin would have represented was broken down into specialties and a proletariat—basically landless peasants, people with tradition, without religion, without culture … Once you had evolved an economy that demanded a proletariat and specialists, and very, very few policy thinkers, it was a certainty that some kind of child training system would appear, that would see to it, more or less, [that people] came out that way.
And then there’s a very subtle point that the Marxist analysis misses. When you have a mass production economy, you can’t screw around with whether people are going to buy the products or not. You have to be certain they’re going to buy the products. In order to do that, you have to produce a kind of dependent clientele that defines itself by what it buys. There may not be a perfect way to set up a production line for these people but there are certain obstacles that you have to remove. You have to remove an inner life—people who have philosophy, and religion, and art. People with an active inner life are undependable consumers because they can get caught in a dream or an idea or a piety and damnit! they don’t buy things when they’re in that kind of a frenzy. So you have to remove the inner life.
Now, I don’t mean that there’s little guys sitting in a room saying, “Let’s remove the inner life,” although I can absolutely guarantee you that a century ago there were.
What you’ve done is set up a reward system for the people who manage the enterprise of schooling that depends upon their absolute and brisk responsiveness to the orders that are passed to them from the foundations and the think tanks and the government bureaus that tinker with this institutional schooling thing. Anyone who resists or asks question is toast. They’re gone. There’s no debate at all on this level. We’ve more or less perfected this thing. We have the only dependable domestic economy in the world. Whether times are good or bad—and I know you’ve been seeing this from the business pages of the paper—there’s no diminution of purchasing, even though a hell of a lot of people are out of work. We buy in good times or bad, in bad times we just mortgage our futures away. We define ourselves by what we buy, we do that because we don’t have an inner life that defines us. This has taken a century to set up and it works brilliantly now. It doesn’t work brilliantly from a humane point of view, but it works brilliantly from a production/consumption point of view.
C: Here we are, we’re at this point, this pernicious system has been set up and running for a hundred years, what do we do now? Open the doors of the schools and send the children home?
JTG: There is no “we”, to start with. What has happened since about 1910, there’s been a virtual recreation of the British class system here. There is no “we”. This is a layered class society and the rewards are meted out mostly, though not totally, according to your class position, and so are the punishments.
Let me give you a little bit of evidence of that, which I would love to have your readers kick around and come up with some possible explanation of. Out of the 50 million or so school kids in the country, about 42,000 of them go to 280 top tier boarding schools in this country. In the last presidential election, 2000, four of the finalists and the two winners of the major party nominations came from the top 20 of these elite private boarding schools, the ones that set the standard for all the rest. George Bush went to Andover, Gore went to St. Albans, John McCain went to Episcopal, Steve Forbes went to Brooks. A wonderful topic would be to push this analysis even further back: Both Roosevelt presidents went to Groton, John Kennedy went to Choate—the statistical improbability of this just beggars the imagination. I’d like to see a narrative explanation of this phenomenon other than that we have achieved a class society without the rhetoric of a class society. And what this says about the class system in the United States and the things that unite the curricula of these highly individualized places like private, elite boarding schools, is of some value to think about. So I spent about 10 years studying—call it the curricula though often it isn’t classroom curricula—these top 20 and I distilled the qualities that they’re aiming at. And none of them cost a nickel. They’re pathetically easy to recreate in a public school classroom if you didn’t have interference. The difficulty is that they aim to produce leaders with a policy mind. People who can think in context rather than think as problem solvers. Anyone who tells you that your kid is going to learn to think as a problem solver, you ought to take him out and beat him with a baseball bat. Those are the specialists, the problem solvers. Whether the problem is going to create larger problems is not up to the problem solver, they don’t bother themselves with that. They invent the poisons, and the seeds that don’t reproduce, and atomic weapons. They don’t think in context.
C: Is there some skill or special set of knowledge that is being taught to the students at these elite schools? If there is, it’s not something that ordinary school children could not learn—
JTG: Oh, absolutely. Although there are huge quantities of highly specialized knowledge, the forms of writing are extremely intricate, it’s just that they’re not beyond anyone’s power to learn, if first you can justify the learning in terms of instant value that you get.
I used to, once a year—I’m reluctant to tell someone else about this—once a year I would show kids that you could make a purchase at any respectable store and you could return it a week later if you could write a correct letter. It didn’t have to be very long but it had certain specific jobs to accomplish. First, you had to identify yourself without actually claiming that you weren’t some kind of looter or thief or unsavory person.
C: You had these kids shoplift and then had them return the merchandise for money?
JTG: No, no, no. You buy it and then you decide you don’t want it, even if you’ve had it for a month. It’s almost a certainty that if you write the right letter to consumer relations that they’ll accept the return, even outside the conditions that they specify. What I wanted them to see is that there are an abundance of languages, each one of them fairly simple to learn. These languages open doors for you. These are ways people signal you can have access to them. They work for apprenticeships, for summer jobs, for letters to celebrities. There isn’t an elite boarding school in the country that doesn’t teach a complete theory of access: to any workplace, to any institution, to any environment, or to any person. In fact the people who pay to send their kids to Groton expect this. If they didn’t have some sign that their kid was growing in awareness of how to use the world around him they would be very hot under the collar. This is how they measure quality in education—a theory of access.
C: Is this theory of access the most important thing we can teach children?
JTG: No, these are all important. Depending upon the individual kid, some of these will take much more quickly and root themselves more deeply than others. But certainly by studying the great private schools you can figure out what—this is in quotes—the best people have thought schools should communicate: a disciplined and trained mind. But what is that exactly? Well, it’s a mind that has a theory of human nature that’s drawn from history, from philosophy, from literature, from theology, never from psychology, from great books, insight into the infrastructure of major institutions like courts, corporations, and governments.
C: You’ve often written and spoken about the difference between education and the “schooling” that goes on in public schools. Can you briefly explain this?
JTG: A schooling is the memorization of roles—the facts you memorize are almost all forgotten immediately—it’s the memorization of rules, and their rules of subordination for the most part: What you’re allowed to say and your position with your income and when to keep your mouth shut, which is almost always.
C: What do you suggest as an alternative to what’s going on in the public schools?
JTG: Again, the difficulty is that there is no “we”. The system works by setting up these dialectical competitions between classes and transitional people. If you want an education for your kids or yourself, you have to first figure out what that would mean for you. To begin with, it would mean learning to think dialectically, to challenge assumptions, and that’s risky; it would mean learning to compete in the marketplace of ideas. And then if the school doesn’t offer that, you could spend all your time at school board meetings arguing for a change—and maybe it’s necessary that some people do that. In fact, you need to realize that you need to get education for yourself—nobody will give you one.
C: Where are people supposed to get this education?
JTG: First, they have to be aware of what they need to know. And I’ve provided in this set of what graduates of elite private boarding schools need to know, at least one template. If you want to argue with any or all of these things, fine, but here is what the best educated people in the country who own everything want their kids to know. Think of that, and then say, “Why, I can know all these things.” None of them cost of nickel. It’s true that they’re only prosecuted in fancy, expensive schools but you don’t need the school to learn these things. Strong competency in the active literacies [writing and public speaking] is achieved by finding opportunities to speak out in public and doing it on a regular basis. By the twentieth, thirtieth time you do it, you do it with your eyes closed, it becomes second nature. It becomes a sport for you. You learn to write by writing. There are hundreds of practical situations that call for a piece of writing. Find out what they are and do them and compare your writings with others. There’s an emphasis on independent work in education that is a reversal of the student/teacher balance. The student does 90 percent in an educational regimen and the teacher does 90 percent in a school regimen. These things are more or less common sense, but it’s just that we don’t have a tradition of examining these things. It isn’t that the ability to examine them doesn’t exist.
What should we do as citizens? We should hold the school institution’s feet to the fire, wherever it exists. We should not accept easy answers, we should not accept quasi-scientific biological explanations that most people are too dumb to learn, so we are kind to them and don’t ask them to do too much. I suppose at some point in history the institution will collapse but meanwhile there’s the practical problem of: What are you going to do for your kids?
C: Exactly. What are we going to do for our kids?
JTG: You might start making them aware of the assumption that school is in their best interest needs to be held in abeyance until it proves itself. That if you do everything a good school asks you to do that your life will turn out well is just errant nonsense! On the face of it it’s a bizarre lie. Once the kid knows that, there’s no point in berating your principal or your schoolteacher, you can assume they’re doing almost the best they know how to do and they’re doing what they’re told to do. There’s no such thing as local control anymore although there’s an illusion of it preserved; nor do the orders come from the State Ed department. Principles and superintendents are listening to policy papers that come out of foundations and think tanks. The State Ed department is the bully boy who punishes if those prescriptions aren’t followed. But to find out who constructs the daily dose in American schools, don’t look at the parents in Ulster and Dutchess counties, or the superintendents or the State Ed department in New York. All this stuff comes from elsewhere and has for at least 50 years. What’s its purpose? Its purpose is to make an efficient and stable society and economy. It ruins about two-thirds of the students. What it does is cripple people, it makes them incomplete—
C: But useful in society.
JTG: Very useful. They’re human resources. Next time you hear somebody say that, if no one’s looking, hit ‘em over the head with a baseball bat. It’s a self-condemnatory term because it means that someone who uses that vocabulary has not examined it. I’m not a human resource for anybody. Nor are you. Nor are any of the kids I ever taught.
C: If your kids were starting school this fall, would you put them in a public school?
JTG: I wouldn’t put them in a public or a private school. I’d homeschool them. I’m saying that at 67. Both of my kids were National Merit Scholars, didn’t cost a penny for either one of them to go to college. National Merit Scholars have the single highest incidence of suicide of any coherent group in the United States. They don’t end up well. “A” students don’t end up very well to tell you the truth.
C: Why do you think that is?
JTG: I think it’s because they waste most of their time learning how to get “A”s, which don’t reflect their understanding of the subject. It reflects their understanding of the system and how it tests its subjects. In business, “B-” students run circles around “A+” students. I think only in the ministry do “A” students rise to the top. Why don’t we announce that in schools? Get “A”s if you want them, but don’t assume that they’ve earned you any kind of privilege at all except being put in a protected location in the school. They identify somebody who is tractable and obedient and those people are extremely useful in corporate situations. But I don’t think they’re very useful in marriages; they’re not very useful in parental relationships; they’re not very useful in friendships. Well, the hell with that. This is a nightmare world we’ve backed ourselves into here, and it does produce a high degree of state revenue and state stability. So if you want to trade liberty, free will, and human variety for safety and comfort—that’s what the trade is. But it ought to be stuck up there.