Blame it all on this skinny little book. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling is what lit a fire in me about homeschooling. The author, John Taylor Gatto, was a New York City public school teacher for 30 years. Each time he won an award for his exemplary teaching (and he won quite a few of these), he would accept it with a brilliant and incendiary speech critiquing the system and even the very idea of school.School is passe, says Gatto. Its original purpose was to regulate the poor, to teach the underclasses not to think for themselves but to obey orders. School as we know it teaches not ideas, self-reliance, and character-building but confusion, indifference, and dependence. Through Gatto's eyes school looks strange and oppressive - a place where you need a pass just to go to the bathroom and move your bowels, a place where the ringing of bells shuts off intellectual curiosity like a light switch.
Gatto likes independent study - the idea of giving kids time, space, and privacy to figure things out for themselves. It's a kind of study you're never going to find in school, but its available in spades for homeschooled kids.
You might not want to agree with Gatto, who says things like "School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." But you can't say the guy's not talking from experience. And bleak and Dickensian as they are, his descriptions of school sound eerily familiar, don't they?
homeschooling
John Taylor Gatto
Dumbing Us Down
3 comments:
Too right! K
Hooray! I'm so glad you read that book. I heard him speak at an unschooling conference a few years ago, and was very inspired.
It's remarkable how many people don't know about the origins of public school, and assume that it's been around for eons--when it's actually a fairly recent experiment in education.
If you're looking for some more reading material, see if you can find "Better Than School" by Nancy Wallace. It's out of print but worth looking for. Rather than a how-to guide, it's a slice of her life as a homeschooling mom in the 1970s in New England, back when homeschoolers had to deal with much more pushback than we do now. Good stuff.
Hey Tara, thanks for the tip - I will look for that book for sure!
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