The Underground History of American Education

Infobox Book
name = The Underground History of American Education
title_orig =


image_caption =
author = John Taylor Gatto
cover_artist =
country = USA
language = English
subject = Education, History, Evaluation of
genre =
publisher = The Oxford Village Press
pub_date = 2003
media_type = Paperback and Hardcover
pages = 412 (Paperback)
isbn = ISBN 0945700040 (Paperback), ISBN 0945700059 (Hardcover)
oclc =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling" (ISBN 0-945700-05-9, pbk. ISBN 0-945700-04-0) is a critique of the U.S. education system by John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto, a former teacher, left the classroom the same year in which he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. He announced his decision in a letter titled [http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue2.htm "I Quit, I Think] ".

Using anecdotes gathered from thirty years of teaching, Gatto presents his view of "modern compulsion schooling", describing a "conflict between systems which offer physical safety and certainty at the cost of suppressing free will, and those which offer liberty at the price of constant risk". Gatto argues that educational strategies promoted by government and industry leaders for over a century included the creation of a system that keeps real power in the hands of very few people.

From the book's Introduction::"... Underground History isn’t a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it’s a good start, I believe, but much remains undone."

:"... what I’m trying to describe [is] that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century."

Russ Kick offers this in summary::"In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately."

External links

* [http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm The book, available online]
* [http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ Gatto's home page]
* [http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm Russ Kick's summary]
* [http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/7/27/215225/986 Review and summary by kuro5hin's localroger]
* [http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/06/1722203&tid=146&tid=103&tid=6 Review and Summary by Slashdot's Chris Acheson]


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