In his 1990 acceptance speech as Teacher of the Year in the New York City public schools, John Taylor Gatto touched a raw nerve:
This is a time of great school crisis and that crisis is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the general community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent — nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.
Gatto is a man of uncommon vision. In a brief news segment from years ago called Classrooms of the Heart, he demonstrated how he could reach children that no one else could.
His 1990 speech to the assembled teachers, administrators and political officials wasn't soft stuff. It sounded pretty radical. It still does -- nearly 18 years later. And yet what has changed? We still seem to be failing to provide a learning experience that is consonant with the real world. As Gatto continued:
I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching — that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aids and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Some schools are better than others, of course. Nothing too terrible about the schools in my neighborhood. But I can't help but sense that we now merely judge our schools in relative terms. As long as our kids can get into "good" colleges, we worry very little. We don't measure outcomes in relation to the potential of our children -- merely in relation to the outcomes of other children (like those "across the tracks"). We are in a better position, but we are nevertheless content to marinate in mediocrity.
I don't think that's inevitable. Not for those who can hear Gatto's message. But who's listening? Are you? Let us know what you think.
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