Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so well? -You figure it out...

John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.