John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose of Schooling

Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto eloquently describes the intentional harm built into the design of mass schooling. Mr. Gatto won both the New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year awards before quitting his teaching job of 30 years with an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled "I Quit, I Think" in which he stated:

"I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true...There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen–that probably guarantees it won’t... I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work, I think.

Ask yourself after watching this what the purpose of 15,000 hours of mass schooling really is when reading, writing, and arithmetic are known to only take a few hundred hours to transmit.