Future Salon

John Taylor Gatto: School is a liar’s world. Let us be done with it.

Got an email yesterday with the following question regarding our Open Source Learning Future Salon:

Mark, thanks for putting on a great lecture series. I got a lot out of Jamais Cascio's seminar. The description of Gatto's presentation sounds like a diatribe against our current education system, which we all agree could be improved. Does he has any positive suggestions? The talk as described sounds like a bummer.

I asked John about any positive suggestions to our education problem and here is his responds: An article he wrote a couple of years ago. Once you read it, you may understand why I am so looking forward to our Open Source Learning Future Salon on the 21st of August. RSVP: http://snurl.com/32ggk

Compulsion-schooling tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

Admit there is no one right to grow up successfully.
One-system schooling has-had a century and a half to prove itself. It is a ghastly failure, Children need the widest possible range of roads in order to find the right one to accommodate themselves. The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody. 1fax credits, vouchers, and other more sophisticated means the necessary to encourage a diverse mix of different school logics of growing up. Only sharp competition can reform the present mess; this needs to be an overriding goal of public policy. Neither national nor state government oversight is necessary to make a voucher/tax credit plan work:
a modicum of local control, a disclosure law with teeth, and a policy of client satisfaction or else is all the citizen protection heeded. It works for supermarkets and doctors. It will work for schools, too, without national testing.

Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto

Thursday 21st of August '08 6pm: Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto at SAP in Palo Alto Please RSVP: http://snurl.com/32ggk

John Taylor Gatto's ended his teaching career after 30 years, while being New York City Teacher of the Year for the third time and New York State Teacher of the year for the second time with on op-ed in the Wall Street Journal writing, that he was no longer willing to hurt children.

Since then he has written several books. Examples:    

• Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum Of Compulsory Schooling
• The Underground History of American Education    

When I talked to him on the phone, he was just putting the finishing touches on his latest book out on the first of October: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling    

Doc Searls as well as Jerry Michalski pointed him out to me years ago. Here is what Jerry wrote in 2003 about John's Harper's Bazar article:

Gatto's in Harper's

Doc first turned me on to John Taylor Gatto's ideas years ago by steering me
toward an essay Gatto had published in The Sun. I think it was his
Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (upgraded to seven, then eight: forgetfulness,
bewilderment and confusion, assigned classism, indifference, emotional
dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem and the "glass
house effect," a total lack of privacy). I've been a fan ever since, and a
questioner not only of compulsory education, which Gatto convincingly
eviscerates, but also of our society's other compulsions.

When I told Jerry that our next Future Salon would be with John Taylor Gatto, he said: You know that he is my hero, when is it? I'll be there. Doc's reaction was: This is great. Let me know when, if I am in Santa Barbara, I will come up for it.

You too should 'come up for it' if you are around: Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto Thursday August 21st at SAP in Palo Alto.