john taylor gatto - best teacher ever

This blog has looked at John Taylor Gatto a few times:
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
Jay Doubleyou: education issues
Jay Doubleyou: social engineering
Jay Doubleyou: the hidden curriculum
Jay Doubleyou: education: dumbing us down

Here are some particularly good videos:

Published on 18 Oct 2014

Get a FREE article at www.JohnTaylorGatto.com . John is "The World's Most Respected Teacher." RON PAUL wrote the Foreword to his NEW Book. 2015 Release! New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, is featured in a mini-documentary about his revolutionary approaches to education.

Mini-Documentary - John Taylor Gatto - MUST SEE! - "Classrooms of the Heart" - YouTube

And a shorter version:


Classrooms of the Heart - John Gatto (1991) - YouTube

He has won awards for his teaching:


The Guerrilla Curriculum - BEST TEACHER EVER! - John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

This is from his book 'The Underground History of American Education':


John Taylor Gatto 14 Principles of an Elite Boarding School Curriculum Build a better you - YouTube
The Underground History Of American Education- John Taylor Gatto, full.wmv - YouTube
Elite Boarding Schools' Curriculum - Mark D. Carlson

And to finish:

Published on 30 Mar 2012

http://www.facebook.com/pages/44conne...

John Taylor Gatto (born December 15, 1935) is a retired American school teacher with nearly 30 years experience in the classroom, and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling, of the perceived divide between the teen years and adulthood, and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.

Gatto was born in the Pittsburgh-area steel town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. In his youth he attended public schools throughout the Pittsburgh Metro Area including Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown as well as a Catholic boarding school in Latrobe. He did undergraduate work at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia, then served in the U.S. Army medical corps at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Following army service he did graduate work at the City University of New York, Hunter College, Yeshiva University, the University of California, and Cornell.
He worked as a writer and held several odd jobs before borrowing his roommate's license to investigate teaching. Gatto also ran for the New York State Senate, 29th District in 1985 and 1988 as a member of the Conservative Party of New York against incumbent David Paterson. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living." He then began a public speaking and writing career, and has received several awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom in 1997.

He promotes homeschooling, and specifically unschooling. Wade A. Carpenter, associate professor of education at Berry College, has called his books "scathing" and "one-sided and hyperbolic, [but] not inaccurate" and describes himself as in agreement with Gatto.

Gatto is currently working on a 3-part documentary about compulsory schooling, titled The Fourth Purpose. He says he was inspired by Ken Burns's Civil War.

What does the school do with the children? Gatto states the following assertions in "Dumbing Us Down":
It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
It makes them indifferent.
It makes them emotionally dependent.
It makes them intellectually dependent.
It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised

John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose Of Schooling - YouTube
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john tayor gatto: teacher, mentor, revolutionary

This blog has regularly featured the work and ideas of John Taylor Gatto:
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
Jay Doubleyou: education issues
Jay Doubleyou: social engineering
Jay Doubleyou: the hidden curriculum
Jay Doubleyou: education: dumbing us down.
It is now a year and a half since he died:
John Taylor Gatto - Google Search
John Taylor Gatto - Wikipedia
A memorial to my mentor John Taylor Gatto - Lefteris Heretakis - Medium
John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling

Here is an obituary from Brittany Hunter, writing in the Foundation for Economic Freedom:

John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America's Most Courageous Teacher

Gatto leaves behind a legacy that inspired thousands of people to challenge the premise on which our education system was built.

Monday, October 29, 2018

 

Brittany Hunter

Education John Taylor Gatto Unschooling

It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the passing of a revolutionary educator, John Taylor Gatto. Gatto spent nearly 30 years as a teacher in the infamously rough New York City public school system. He was awarded New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years while also being recognized as New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.

Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents.

Over the course of his career, Gatto was recognized by other educators for the rapport he had built with his students. While other teachers were spending much of their day on behavioral management issues, Gatto’s students were actively engaged in his lectures and genuinely excited about learning. When faculty members would come to him seeking advice, his prescription was simple: treat your students the same way you treat anyone else.

Above all, Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents to share with the rest of the world. They didn’t want to be talked down to but longed to be treated with respect and dignity. He recognized that their worth was not determined by the neighborhoods where they lived, their parents’ annual salaries, or the scores they received on standardized tests. He concluded that “genius,” is “as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

After three decades in the classroom, Gatto realized that the public school system was squashing individualism more than it was educating students and preparing them for the real world. To make matters worse, his later research would reveal that this dumbing down was not just by accident, but by design.

Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system.

Feeling the education system was beyond repair, Gatto could no longer in good conscience be an active participant. Rather than sending his letter of resignation to his superiors in his school district, he sent a copy of “I Quit, I Think” to the Wall Street Journal, where it was published as an op-ed on July 25, 1991.

In his biting resignation, he wrote:

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.

Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system. He wrote several books on his experience in the classroom including Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. His book The Underground History of American Education is perhaps the most accurate and damning history of the American education system that has ever been written.

He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow.

Gatto encouraged parents to foster an environment where their children could follow their bliss rather than being stuck in a classroom, trained to be just another cog in the machine. He inspired teachers to reassess their reasons for becoming educators and to challenge the status quo.

He was also a firm believer in self-directed education, sometimes referred to as “unschooling.” He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow.

He wrote:

Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

Author and ardent unschooling advocate Kerry McDonald had this to say of Gatto's legacy in this regard:

John Taylor Gatto’s writings inspired a generation of parents and educators to question deep-seated beliefs about compulsory mass schooling and pursue alternatives. For homeschoolers, in particular, Gatto affirmed the vital role of family and empowered parents to take back control of their child’s education. His words will continue to have a lasting impact on education for years to come.

Zak Slayback, who authored The End of School and wrote the foreword to Gatto's newest edition of Dumbing Us Down, also had a few remarks on Gatto's legacy:

Gatto's writing, teaching, and approach to not just education but human flourishing in general inspired me to think critically about my own life and education. He's one of the most important thinkers in American history—that's becoming more obvious every day. He'll be missed dearly.

Slayback also said he carries a card in his wallet with this John Taylor Gatto quote:

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life or you become an unwitting actor in somebody else's script.

On October 25th, after a long battle with health issues, Gatto departed this world at 82 years old. He is survived by his loving wife and two children. In addition to his family, he leaves behind a legacy that inspired thousands of people to challenge the premise on which our education system was built and to protect a child’s right to a real education built on actual experience rather than government-sanctioned texts.

So as we honor the life of this great man, I leave you with a few of Gatto's most inspirational quotes.

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”

“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does. It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its “homework.” “How will they learn to read?” you ask, and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.”

“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

Brittany Hunter

Brittany was a senior writer for the Foundation for Economic Education. Additionally, she is a co-host of Beltway Banthas, a podcast that combines Star Wars and politics. Brittany believes that the most effective way to promote individual liberty and free-market economics is by telling timely stories that highlight timeless principles.

John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America's Most Courageous Teacher - Foundation for Economic Education



See also:
Unschooling - Wikipedia
Anti-psychiatry - Wikipedia

the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states

The purpose of education has always been moral:



Maintaining Classroom Discipline by using Democratic Methods - YouTube



Let's Be Good American Citizens at School - 1953 Educational Documentary - Ella73TV - YouTube

However, recently, moral panic has swept the West:



Jay Doubleyou: panic in the west over educational achievements in the far east

But should these comparisons be made?

In fact, it was Europe and not China which developed modern technology:
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Needham Question
Great Divergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "Golden Mean" Doctrine in the Chinese cultural tradition is not conducive to the cultivation of innovative scientists.
Why can’t China win the Nobel Prize?
CHINESE SCIENCE AND THE ‘NOBEL PRIZE COMPLEX’

Because, it could be said, the education system in China and the East Asia tends to produce students of a certain type:



Be Glad for Our Failure to Catch Up with China in Education | Psychology Today

But hold on: things aren't that great in 'the West' either...

Despite more and more money going into schools, literacy rates have collapsed in the West:

According to John Taylor Gatto, once a New York Teacher of the Year, military applicants in the 1930s tested 98 percent literate.  During World War II our soldiers’ literacy rate was 96 percent.  In 1950 only 81 percent of Korean war enlistees passed literacy tests, and by the 1970s, during the Vietnam war, the percent was down to 73.

Maybe that drop can be explained by an army recruited increasingly from the unprivileged.  But Gatto points out that in 1940 the general white population tested four percent illiterate and blacks 20 percent.  Now the numbers are 17 and 44 percent.  Black illiteracy has doubled, white has quadrupled.

What's Wrong With the Schools? - The Donella Meadows Institute
Everything We Think About Schooling Is Wrong! 

Here is John Taylor Gatto:


Mini-Documentary - John Taylor Gatto - MUST SEE! - "Classrooms of the Heart" - YouTube
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever

And here is his explanation for why 'education standards' have been declining:

... you shouldn’t be fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams was fooled when he observed in 1880 that what was being cooked up for kids unlucky enough to be snared by the newly proposed institutional school net combined characteristics of the cotton mill and the railroad with those of a state prison.

Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a “human resource” and managed as a “workforce.” No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled.

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance.

Schooling an Industrial Proletariat : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

John Taylor Gatto has had a lot more to say about education:
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever

We might well praise the achievements of the German education system:
Jay Doubleyou: neets - again
'The best engineers come from Germany' - BBC News

However, this is what Gatto has to say about the foundations of that system:



The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube
Prussian education system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Full text of "John Taylor Gatto The Underground History Of American Education Book"

And here he makes it clear, in his opinion at least, what 'the purpose of education' is:



John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose Of Schooling - YouTube

With the full text here:
John Taylor Gatto – The Purpose of SchoolingTruth versus Disinformation . . . Everything You Know is Wrong About Schooling

Here's an overview:
Human Resources: Gatto explains the seedy origin of public education-indoctrination - YouTube

This is John Taylor Gatto's own life experience:
The Hall of Mirrors by John Taylor Gatto - Life Learning Magazine

But it's not just Gatto who has pronounced on these things:

H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not ‘to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.’

Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ...factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

Against School, by John Taylor Gatto
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down

Ivan Illich, another 'radical' educator had this to say:



Scary School Nightmare - YouTube
Deschooling Society - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jay Doubleyou: deschooling society

Which leads us to some 'solutions'...

Don't go to school:

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever 'graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Contad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.

How could penniless elementary school dropout Edison grow up on his own in a working-class environment, invent the electric light, the phonograph, win 1,003 patents, and build General Electric? Edison had contempt for college graduates and discriminated against them in hiring all his life. 

WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION

Try home-schooling:
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works

“Now for the good news… School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, 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. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

John Taylor Gatto: Why Public Education Cripples Our Kids | COMMON CORE

Look at how 'elite' private schools prepare children to face the world:



John Taylor Gatto 14 Principles of an Elite Boarding School Curriculum Build a better you - YouTube
Elite Boarding Schools' Curriculum - Mark D. Carlson
John Taylor Gatto’s 14 Themes of the Elite Private School Curriculum

See also:
Jay Doubleyou: socratic method
Jay Doubleyou: socratic method pt 2

And:
Jay Doubleyou: questioning and problem-solving

And:
Jay Doubleyou: teaching the teachers: the future of education

Lastly:
Human Resources - YouTube
Taylorism on ABC World Report - YouTube
The Scientific Management of Children - John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

But not quite:
David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’ | Books | The Guardian
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john taylor gatto - rejecting the racist school system

It's now almost two years since the death of educationalist John Taylor Gatto, who "envisioned an education system that placed freedom and justice above technology and efficiency":

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.

John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling

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.

John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling

Here he is teaching black kids - thirty years ago:

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Classrooms of the Heart - John Taylor Gatto - INSPIRATIONAL!! - YouTube

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what is the point of education?

What's it all about?
Jay Doubleyou: the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states

Is it about training people to work?
Jay Doubleyou: neets - again
'The best engineers come from Germany' - BBC News

Is it about learning facts?
Jay Doubleyou: oxford graded reader and bbc film: hard times by charles dickens
Hard Times- Charles Dickens - YouTube

Is it about domesticating people?

Some of their most provocative ideas are in the area of education, which they believe is a form of domestication. “One of the main reasons so few animals can be domesticated is that only rare social species let humans sit in the role of dominant pack animal,” they write. “And we, too, naturally resist submitting to other humans.” They cite a study showing that unschooled workers from less-developed parts of the world aren’t nearly as productive as rich-world workers, even at repetitive manual labor that you might not think demands much education. According to Hanson and Simler, these unschooled workers “won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with co-workers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before.” In the rich world, we have learned to do all those things, and mostly we learned to do them at school, where “an industrial-era school system prepares us for the modern workplace.” Hanson and Simler explain:

Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask for permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile. . . . In fact, teachers reward discipline independent of its effect on learning, and in ways that tamp down on student creativity. Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.

Having watched one son go all the way through secondary school, and with another who still has three years to go, I found that account painfully close to the reality of what modern schooling is like.

Futures Forum: Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends?
Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends? | The New Yorker

John Taylor Gatto has a few ideas (from 2:08):

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Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
John Taylor Gatto: On Life and Education - YouTube

And:
Human Resources: Gatto explains the seedy origin of public education-indoctrination - YouTube

And (from 2.30):



JOHN TAYLOR GATTO: "BEYOND SCHOOLING" 5 - YouTube
Against School – John Taylor Gatto | Anti Oligarch

Here are the six principles again:

Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races."

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers.

Against School – John Taylor Gatto | Anti Oligarch
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down

See also:
The Underground History Of American Education- John Taylor Gatto, full.wmv - YouTube

And:

What does the school do with the children? Gatto states the following assertions in "Dumbing Us Down":
It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
It makes them indifferent.
It makes them emotionally dependent.
It makes them intellectually dependent.
It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised

Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever
John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose Of Schooling - YouTube

You might try home-schooling instead:
Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling more popular in uk
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works
BBC Breakfast Interview with Ann & Josh Newstead 11th June 2009 - YouTube

Or do it yourself:
Jay Doubleyou: can children teach themselves - using technology?
Jay Doubleyou: teaching the teachers: the future of education
Jay Doubleyou: education happens beyond the classroom
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education: dumbing us down

Looking at educational achievements, we can compare the UK and East Asia:
BBC News - England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths

But should the UK be learning from the Far East:
Jay Doubleyou: rote learning
Jay Doubleyou: panic in the west over educational achievements in the far east
Great Divergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When it comes to the apprenticeship system, we can also compare the UK and Germany:
BBC News - You're hired: How the apprentice gets ahead in Germany
Apprenticeships: Keeping up with the Schmidts | The Economist
BBC News - 'The best engineers come from Germany'
BBC News - Can German business ideas revive the UK economy?

But should we be considering the German education as a 'model'?

A little history:
Prussian reforms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Land of Frankenstein

The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.

The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.

In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition¹ lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.

The Land of Frankenstein - John Taylor Gatto

The Prussian Reform Movement

The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus. Ask yourself which form of governance responds better to public opinion and you will realize what a radical chapter in European affairs was opened. The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen,¹where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command.

The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people’s schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history.

This universal system of compulsion schooling was up and running by 1819, and soon became the eighth wonder of the world, promising for a brief time—in spite of its exclusionary layered structure—liberal education for all. But this early dream was soon abandoned. This particular utopia had a different target than human equality; it aimed instead for frictionless efficiency. From its inception Volksschulen, the people’s place, heavily discounted reading; reading produced dissatisfaction, it was thought. The Bell-school remedy was called for: a standard of virtual illiteracy formally taught under state church auspices. Reading offered too many windows onto better lives, too much familiarity with better ways of thinking. It was a gift unwise to share with those permanently consigned to low station.

The Prussian Reform Movement - John Taylor Gatto

>>> This is a video of the above:



The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

This is Gatto speaking:



John Gatto Prussian Education - YouTube

>>> Are we being made stupid?



The New Dumbness, by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube
Dumbing Down of UK Education While Pretending to Improve It - YouTube

>>> Particularly interesting from Gatto:



Human Resources: Gatto explains the seedy origin of public education-indoctrination - YouTube
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down

>>> A nice graphic from 4 minutes (after one of the most famous graduation speeches) from Ken Robinson (from the RSAnimate series):



Public "Education" has become indoctrination and distraction - YouTube
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms - YouTube

It seems to be about the 'engineering of people':
Jay Doubleyou: social engineering
HUMAN RESOURCES: Social Engineering In The 20th Century -- by Scott Noble - YouTube
The Scientific Management of America (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube
The Scientific Management of America (Part 2), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

John Taylor Gatto is a relative of the inventor of Taylorism or 'Scientific Managment':
Taylorism on ABC World Report - YouTube
Frederick Taylor- the biggest bastard ever 1 of 2 - YouTube

Ivan Illich had a lot to say about this:
Jay Doubleyou: deschooling society
Jay Doubleyou: ivan illich on education and health

As did Charles Dickens:
Jay Doubleyou: oxford graded reader and bbc film: hard times by charles dickins

Much of this is about making school compulsory. In the UK and the US it is not:
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works
Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling more popular in uk

To finish provocatively...

Whilst one can ask how 'the most educated country in Europe if not the world' was hypnotised by National Socialism...
The Führer Myth: How Hitler Won Over the German People - SPIEGEL ONLINE
The Wave (2008 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wave (TV Movie 1981) - IMDb

... one can also ask how 'the land of the free' has its capital named 'Bigbrother London':
Big Brother is watching: London police to wear cameras (Wired UK)
How Big Brother watches your every move - Telegraph

... and why the British are not disturbed by the revelations by Edward Snowden:
NSA Leak SPY WARS UK media not bothered about Snowden Revelations - YouTube
Perhaps I'm out of step and Britons just don't think privacy is important | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer
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