Author John Taylor Gatto, in the 10th-anniversary edition of his remarkable book Dumbing Us Down, says that when compulsory schooling was first proposed in 1850, it was resisted—some-times with guns—by an estimated 80 percent of the population. Not until 1880 did parents surren-der, seeing the militia take charge and march the children off to school under guard. "Schools," he declares, "are intended to produce human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. .. . Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell films and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings, they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves."
The words of a madman? Don't judge Gatto (a respected teacher, by the way!) before you read the book. It opens with four solid pages of recommendations from authorities in the field.
Gatto writes, "...we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants...We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense."
