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Revision as of 18:20, 19 August 2007
John Taylor Gatto (born John Gatto) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years 8 months and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.
Biography
Gatto was born in the Pittsburgh area steel town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. In his youth he attended public schools throughout the Pittsburgh Metro Area including Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown as well as a Catholic boarding school in Latrobe. He did undergraduate work at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia, then served in the U.S. Army medical corps at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Following army service he did graduate work at the City University of New York, Hunter College, Yeshiva, the University of California, and Cornell.
He worked as a writer and held several odd jobs before borrowing his roommate's license to investigate teaching. He was named New York City Teacher of the year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991[1]. In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living". He then began a public speaking and writing career, and has received several awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom in 1997. He promotes homeschooling, and specifically unschooling. After learning from another teacher named John Gatto that he was regularly confused with him, he added Taylor to his name.
Inspired by Ken Burns's Civil War, Gatto is currently working to produce a 3-part documentary about compulsory schooling, titled The Fourth Purpose.
Works
- Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992).
- The Exhausted School (1993).
- A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling (2000). ISBN 1-893163-21-0
- The Underground History Of American Education (2001). (Complete Text Online)
- Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, And Why (2003). Originally published in Harper's Magazine. (Complete Text Online)
See also
External links
- Official Website
- Kinza Academy, Homeschooling with the Classics. Gatto is on the Advisory Board for Kinza Academy.
- Altruists.org download audio files of some of Gatto's talks
- Video of Gatto interview, broken into topic sections
- The Link Homeschool Newspaper Online Gatto is a regular columnist of The Link Homeschool Newspaper and the site maintains a collection of his essays.
Writings and lectures
- "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" - Fall 1991 issue of Whole Earth Review
- A set of quotes from Gatto and links to original essays
- Speech at a home schooling Conference by Radio for Peace (mp3)
- Collection of Gatto Files, mainly mp3s
- "Institutional Schooling Must Be Destroyed"
- "The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling"
- "The Public School Nightmare:Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?" by John Taylor Gatto" article published by Diablo Valley School
- "Why Schools Don't Educate"
- "Lectures July 4th weekend annually in Troy, NY"
- "Teacher of the Year acceptance speech"