by Laurie A. Couture With every decade that passes, new legal and civil rights have been fought for and won for every group of adults in Westernized cultures. The fight continues around the globe in order to share those legal protections with oppressed populations in other cultures. With each passing decade, there have been...
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Public Schooling
Youth Rights Resolutions for the New Decade
The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling
by John Taylor Gatto Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn’t know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn’t eliminate dumbness – in fact, we now know that people read...
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The Nazi Model For Outcome-Based Education
by Berit Kjos History keeps repeating itself, but few heed its warnings. If our leaders did, they would know that today’s massive attempt to transform our culture by nationalizing education will bring repression, not freedom. They would see that the manipulative strategies of Mastery Learning will create human puppets, not independent thinkers. In spite...
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Institutional Schooling Must Be Destroyed
by John Taylor Gatto The easiest way to make America better is to stop spending enormous treasure and human effort on forced schooling of the unprivileged young. By “unprivileged” I mean the bottom 95-90% of our population, not the ghettoized poor. Public education, as it is called, is actually the most fantastic intellectual confidence...
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How public education cripples our kids, and why
by John Taylor Gatto I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored,...
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Harm in the School System
by Shaun Kerry, M.D. As a social psychiatrist, I examine society much like a doctor examines a patient. One of the most troubling ailments that I encounter is our school system, which – without ever realizing it – harms the majority of our students. It is my belief that our school system is the...
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Public school is like prison
by John Taylor Gatto My wife doesn’t allow a television in our home, so when I’m traveling alone, as I often must, temptation sometimes overwhelms me and I find myself indiscriminately channel-surfing for hours, searching for what — I don’t know, perhaps a football game even in March or April, May, June, July, August....
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I may be a teacher, but I’m not an educator
by John Taylor Gatto I’ve taught public school for 26 years but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think. I’ve come...
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Who wouldn’t be ‘school phobic’?
Written by: Sarah Fitz-Claridge ‘School phobia’ is a dreadful label for some children’s perfectly understandable response to being compelled to go to school against their will. They are not phobic, any more than a conscientious objector is a coward; they are refusing – and in most cases very nobly. Over the years, I have...
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