Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.

all the childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing. I assign a type of extended schooling called homework, so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized, from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood.” A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets. Of course, I encourage parents to file reports about their own child’s waywardness too. “Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, or even tattle on their own parents. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.Īs John Gatto reflected upon his own years of teaching, he realized that the seventh lesson he taught was that, “One can’t hide.” In school, “children quickly learn that they are always watched and that there is no private space or time.“ Mr. In simpler terms, I tried to maneuver them into positions where they would have the chance to be their own teachers, and to make themselves the major text of their own education.” John Taylor Gatto. But slowly, I began to realize t hat the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act – to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.īit by bit, I began to devise gorilla exercises to allow as many of the kids I taught as possible the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad arrange of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage.

Was it possible that I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it. They didn’t do this often enough to make my teaching easy but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself is what was dumbing them down. “The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence: insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality – that I became confused. Gatto to wonder if the school system was dumbing down his students? His thoughts are best stated in the introduction of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Agenda of Compulsory Schooling.

John gatto dumbing us down