John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto
Gatto in 2009
Born	(1935-12-15)December 15, 1935 Monongahela, Pennsylvania, US
Died	October 25, 2018(2018-10-25) (aged 82) New York City, US
Other name	John Gatto
Education	Cornell University University of Pittsburgh Yeshiva University Hunter College Reed College University of California, Berkeley
Occupations	Author Speaker Teacher
Known for	Educational activist Scholar New York State Teacher of the Year
Spouse	Janet Gatto
Website	www.johntaylorgatto.com

John Taylor Gatto (December 15, 1935 – October 25, 2018) was an American author. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on American schools. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling which attempt to criticize the modern education system and promote the concept of unschooling and a return to homeschooling.

Biography

Gatto was born to Andrew Michael Mario and Frances Virginia (née Zimmer) Gatto in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Pittsburgh. 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 attended numerous undergraduate and graduate institutions.

By the late 1950s he worked as a copywriter scripting commercials in New York City. In the spring of 1960, he borrowed his roommate's teaching license, went into Harlem to work as a substitute teacher. Gatto earned his teaching certificate in the summer of 1960. In 1963, he was hired as a fulltime 8th grade English teacher at Intermediate School 44 on New York City's Upper West Side. Gatto moved on to Lincoln Academy (now Horizons Middle School) in 1981, which was considered a dumping ground for kids with behavior problems. Eventually Gatto found a position teaching predominantly poor, at-risk kids 8th grade students at Booker T. Washington Junior High in Spanish Harlem.

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 awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville 1997 Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom.

Gatto promoted homeschooling, and specifically unschooling and open source learning.

Gatto was featured in the 2011 Evangelical Christian film IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America. The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto was released in early 2012 by Tragedy and Hope Communications.

Personal life

Gatto was married to Janet (MacAdam) with whom he spent half the year in New York City and the other half of the year at their farmhouse in upstate New York.

Use of sources

Gatto's books contain sources but not organized bibliographies, and were similarly never authored as peer-reviewed papers, and he invites readers to find evidence to support his claims by themselves. While there is value in this approach, it does present a number of challenges. In a number of cases, Gatto pulls a snippet of a passage from a larger speech or text, removing additional context. Some examples from Underground History:

• On page 59, he wrote: “In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure: ‘We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.’” While Wilson did make this statement, he said it about three-quarters of the way through a 6300-word speech to a group of high school teachers. Multiple sources identify the speech as one given on January 9, 1909 to the New York City High School Teachers Association, not a group of businessmen.
• On page 153, he wrote: “Between 1840 and 1860, male schoolteachers were cleansed from the Massachusetts system and replaced by women. A variety of methods was used, including the novel one of paying women slightly more than men in order to bring shame into play in chasing men out of the business.” Gatto does not source this claim and it's unclear where it came from. While the profession was feminized in this period, it was related to a concurrent shift to professionalization and the changing dynamics around women's roles.
• On page 162, he wrote: “If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.” Gatto’s use of this statistic is misleading. The Swiss high school structure offers multiple tracts for students. About a quarter of students in the country elect to follow an academic track and about three-quarters participate in a combination of academics and vocational training or apprenticeships but most virtually all young people pursue commencement level education. There are additional demarcations within different programs, based on where a student lives and what they’re studying.
• On page 163, he wrote: “Even thirty years after Waterloo, so highly was Prussia regarded in America and Britain, the English-speaking adversaries selected the Prussian king to arbitrate our northwest border with Canada. Hence the Pennsylvania town ‘King of Prussia.’” According to the King of Prussia Historical Association, the city was named for a prominent inn located in the area. It’s believed the inn was built in 1709 and named by its Prussian builder for the recently crowned king, Frederick I. The battle of Waterloo was in 1815.
• On page 164, he wrote: “Prussia itself was a curious place, not an ordinary country unless you consider ordinary a land which by 1776 required women to register each onset of their monthly menses with the police.” It is unclear where he got this claim from as there does not appear to be any writing from English-language historians of women's history that supports this claim.

In addition to specific claims or inaccurate quotes, Gatto relied on the "factory model" myth in his arguments against public education. Advocates of the myth, such as Gatto, claim that schools were based on factories or focused on preparing children to work in factories. Educational historians describe the phrase as misleading and an inaccurate representation of the development of American public education.

In 2025, Hazard Spence completed an IndieGoGo funded project, openhistory.education, to connect Gatto's writing to sources. In several instances, Spence was not able to identify a source for quote or claim Gatto had written or identified Gatto had misattributed a quote. For example, on page 166, Gatto wrote: "Goethe said Frederick 'saw Prussia as a concept, the root cause of a process of abstraction consisting of norms, attitudes and characteristics which acquired a life of their own. It was a unique process, supra-individual, an attitude depersonalized, motivated only by the individual’s duty to the State.'" Spence was not able to find the source for this claim. Spence identifies that Gatto misattributed a Victor Hugo quote on page 173, and that he "embellished" a passage from an essay by William Torrey Harris.

Selected bibliography

Articles and essays

• "Against School." Harper’s Magazine (September 2003), pp. 33–38. "How public education cripples our kids, and why."

Books

• Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Critical Commentary. New York: Monarch Press (1975). ISBN 978-0671009663. OCLC 5687233.
• Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers (1992). Foreword by Thomas Moore. ISBN 0865714487. OCLC 926842308.
• The Exhausted School: The First National Grassroots Speakout on the Right to School Choice: Carnegie Hall, New York City. New York: Oxford Village Press (1993). Preface by Patrick Farenga. ISBN 978-0945700029. OCLC 1010741721.
• A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books (2002). ISBN 978-1893163218. OCLC 1043481859.
• The Underground History of American Education. New York: Oxford Village Press (2001). ISBN 978-0945700043. OCLC 45004688.
  • Revised edition (2017) by Oxford Scholars Press (New York) features a foreword is by U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, an introduction by David Ruenzel, and an afterword by Richard Grove of Tragedy and Hope Media.
• Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island, B.C. (Canada): New Society Publishers (2009). ISBN 978-0865716315. OCLC 1073186340.
• The Adventures of Snider, the CIA Spider. Lost Tools Press (2017). Illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert. ISBN 978-0989280037.

Filmography

Documentaries

• Human Resources (2010)
• IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity (2011)
• Thrive: What on Earth Will It Take? (2011)
• The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto (2012)
  • Sourced transcript.
  • Bibliography and references.

See also

• Critical pedagogy
• Deschooling Society (book by Ivan Illich)
• Hidden curriculum
• How Children Fail (book by John Holt)
• Total institution

Other critics of public education:

• Zachariah Montgomery
• Richard Grant White
• Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt

External links

• Official website
• The Underground History of American Education at Internet Archive
• Dumbing Us Down at Internet Archive
• "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" – originally published in Whole Earth Review, Fall 1991
• The Seven Lesson School Teacher
• "Why Schools Don't Educate - Teacher of the Year acceptance speech"
• I Quit, I Think letter
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• John Taylor Gatto at IMDb
• Works by or about John Taylor Gatto in libraries (WorldCat catalog)