The Underground History of Education
- ''by John Taylor Gatto
Using anecdotes gathered from thirty years of teaching, Gatto presents his view of modern compulsion schooling, describing a "conflict between systems which offer physical safety and certainty at the cost of suppressing free will". Gatto argues that educational strategies promoted by government and industry leaders for over a century included the creation of a system that keeps real power in the hands of very few people.
From the book's Introduction:
- "... Underground History isn’t a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it’s a good start, I believe, but much remains undone."
- "... what I’m trying to describe [is] that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century."
- "In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately."
External links
The first eleven chapters of the book, available onlineGatto's home page
Russ Kick's summary