Jay Doubleyou: john tayor gatto: teacher, mentor, revolutionary
This is from a piece from last October,
Death anniversaries provide us an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of many great historical personalities, but rarely do we find a figure so recently passed yet so quickly forgotten as John Taylor Gatto.
Gatto was born in 1935 in the working-class Western Pennsylvania town of Monongahela. He passed away on October 25, 2018, in his adopted home of New York City. In his nearly 30 years of classroom teaching, Gatto witnessed first hand some of the most radical experiments in mass schooling that the world has ever seen. After being named New York City Teacher of the Year consecutively in 1989, 1990 and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, Gatto rejected what he called the “school religion punishing the nation” and left his formal profession of teaching in search of a job where he “didn’t have to hurt kids to make a living.”
From that day in 1991 until his death one year ago, Gatto wrote and spoke about his experiences in U.S. public schools in an effort not just to critique a system which he saw as beyond reform, but also to envision what education could look like in a truly free and just society. While Gatto gained a readership among certain sections of the homeschooling and alternative education movements, his piercing criticism of U.S. schooling and its link to the crisis of Western civilization deserves a much wider audience.
This is from a piece from last October,
Death anniversaries provide us an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of many great historical personalities, but rarely do we find a figure so recently passed yet so quickly forgotten as John Taylor Gatto.
Gatto was born in 1935 in the working-class Western Pennsylvania town of Monongahela. He passed away on October 25, 2018, in his adopted home of New York City. In his nearly 30 years of classroom teaching, Gatto witnessed first hand some of the most radical experiments in mass schooling that the world has ever seen. After being named New York City Teacher of the Year consecutively in 1989, 1990 and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, Gatto rejected what he called the “school religion punishing the nation” and left his formal profession of teaching in search of a job where he “didn’t have to hurt kids to make a living.”
From that day in 1991 until his death one year ago, Gatto wrote and spoke about his experiences in U.S. public schools in an effort not just to critique a system which he saw as beyond reform, but also to envision what education could look like in a truly free and just society. While Gatto gained a readership among certain sections of the homeschooling and alternative education movements, his piercing criticism of U.S. schooling and its link to the crisis of Western civilization deserves a much wider audience.
What's interesting is how his life and work is relevant to today's discussions on race and society:
It is this connection between schooling and white supremacy which Gatto understood. He taught for years in working-class Black schools in Harlem, and observed that “black kids had caught on to the fact that their school was a liar’s world, a jobs project for seedy white folk.”
Instead of modifying the curriculum for these students in order to prepare them for their presumed subordinate social role, Gatto challenged “the scientific religion of schooling which believes [Black people] to be genetically challenged” and presented a rigorous education focused on strong reading skills and critical discussion of fundamental questions in history, philosophy and literature.
By refusing to lower expectations for Black youth in school and eventually rejecting the racist school system altogether in favor of autonomous institutions such as Marva Collins’s groundbreaking Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Gatto provided a concrete example of what an educational program for the abolition of whiteness might look like.
A rapidly growing homeschooling movement is reviving a long tradition of family and community-based education, particularly among Black Americans who have been historically barred from or discriminated against in the school system.
Instead of modifying the curriculum for these students in order to prepare them for their presumed subordinate social role, Gatto challenged “the scientific religion of schooling which believes [Black people] to be genetically challenged” and presented a rigorous education focused on strong reading skills and critical discussion of fundamental questions in history, philosophy and literature.
By refusing to lower expectations for Black youth in school and eventually rejecting the racist school system altogether in favor of autonomous institutions such as Marva Collins’s groundbreaking Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Gatto provided a concrete example of what an educational program for the abolition of whiteness might look like.
A rapidly growing homeschooling movement is reviving a long tradition of family and community-based education, particularly among Black Americans who have been historically barred from or discriminated against in the school system.
Here he is teaching black kids - thirty years ago:
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