Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling | 
 enlarge | Author: John Taylor Gatto
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  120 reviews
Sales Rank: 15796
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6 x 0.5
ISBN: 0865714487
Dewey Decimal Number: 370
EAN: 9780865714489
ASIN: 0865714487
Publication Date: February 1, 2002
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Product Description
With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto's "guerrilla teaching." John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 115 more reviews...
 A great opening argument in the case against government schooling September 21, 2008
This book is basically a collection of speeches and essays by anti-gov't school advocate John Taylor Gatto, who is himself a longtime veteran of teaching -- he even won some "Teacher of the Year" awards -- in New York City public schools. Here, he looks at what our school system REALLY teaches, and what's wrong with those teachings.
While short, this book is compulsively readable and sketches many of the arguments found fleshed out in Mr. Gatto's longer works (such as THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION) as well as works by other critics of "public education" who are of the libertarian, anarchist, individualist, or paleoconservative mindset (or combinations thereof.) Mr. Gatto is of the opinion that compulsory government schools can't be "fixed" because they're actually accomplishing their real (as opposed to their stated) purpose perfectly. That is, they're turning out, in factory-like fashion, incomplete, soul-less, dependent, ignorant people who are better suited to being cogs in a machine or bees in a hive than they are to being good, self-sufficient citizens of a free republic. These mass people are educated just enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, but not enough to think critically about their situation, question authority, or take care of themselves (serving the interests of big government and big business which actually, contrary to popular belief, dovetail more often than not.)
Read this book with an open mind. It will probably go against your conscious conceptions, but it will also articulate many of the murky misgivings you've felt if you have attended and/or worked at government schools. It may even make you decide to keep your child from becoming one of the victims of the Leviathan schools. Heck, if enough Americans read this book (and others like it that dare to tell unpopular truths), maybe we could actually slay this particular Leviathan. One can hope.
 great for the most part August 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a great book for the most part. Although I agree with many of his points, I disagree in the part where he proposes a reform that requires mandatory community service. In the book he mostly says that people do well when they aren't made to do something, and yes community service is great but it shouldn't be forced on people, and people should have the option to decide if that is what they want to do. That's what freedom is all about.
He's right about school. My experience in school felt like a prison, where my teachers didn't take me seriously, they sometimes liked humiliating me and my classmates, and honestly to this day, I have zero respect for teachers. I can't look back on a teacher that I actually liked. Many of them just made me follow dumb rules that had nothing to do with learning but about respecting authority.
Even as a college student, I feel that college is just another scam, its not about learning but about getting that degree so you can get a good job. Getting As and Bs isn't a sign of intelligence, but a sign that you did the work the way that your teacher wanted you to. I think true learning occurs when you are accountable to yourself for your own education.
Great! July 9, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
i got my product in a timely manner and it was in great condition. Thanks!!
a must for taxpayers, teachers, parents and students May 29, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
John Taylor Gatto taught in New York City public schools for 30 years. He is now a writer and a lecturer. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year.
"The Seven Lesson School Teacher" is the first chapter of his book. It is the speech he gave after he was named New York State teacher of the year in 1991.
I've summarized the first chapter (which I taught to my high school sophomores and juniors).
Mr. Gatto said that he teaches 7 things. They are as follows:
1)confusion - lessons are out of context & out of sequence; random instruction; standardized tests; too many subjects; assemblies; fire drills; staff development days; age segregation; no depth in subjects; most teachers are not experts
2)class position - kids assigned numbers; stay in classes; stay in classrooms; envy and fear of the better classes; contempt for the lower classes
3)indifference - forced enthusiasm; bell rings, students must stop doing stuff (in class or change classes)
4)emotional dependency - individuality is discouraged; students lack rights; teachers & administrators manipulate and control the students
5)intellectual dependency - lesson chosen by teachers, administration or school board; students told to wait before working; wait for the expert to tell you what to do; helpless people are good for the economy (food service, law, medicine, teaching, tv, entertainment)
6)provisional self-esteem - confident people are problems; you are to be evaluated & judged; most grades have very little work in them; self-evaluation is rarely done; people must rely on experts to see their value
7)one can't hide - control and surveillance; no private spaces or private time; little time between classes; people trained to tell on each other; homework keeps them busy and away from other learning
"Schools are an essential support system for social engineering that condemns most to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control" pg. 13 (this reminds me of Huxley's Brave New World)
Mr. Gatto makes a few other points in his speech as well. I've listed them in bullet format for you.
- Schools were created partly as a result of two "Red Scares" in 1848 and 1919. People in power were afraid of the industrial poor and wanted to reign in the culture of the new immigrants (Celtics, Slavs and Latins).
- Look at the seven lessons: they are "all prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius." (16)
- These lessons and the problems in our schools have now seized the middle class as well
- Critical thinking is not taught
- Solutions: family schools, farm schools, small entrepreneurial schools, religious schools, craft schools
- Lessons not taught: self-reliance, self-motivation, perseverance, courage, dignity, love
- TV, sports/clubs, and jobs take up all the free time outside of school - learning and the feeling of community are stifled
Makes you think. April 9, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I wish I'd read this while I was in school; I'd have seen then that there was something wrong with the system, not me. This book is thought-provoking and a must-read for parents of kids of all ages.
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