John Taylor Gatto, the libertarian author of The Underground History of American Education and former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year, is raising money to produce a three-episode, six-hour Ken-Burns-type documentary examining the forces, trends and conscious intentions "behind the persistent dumbing down of our children."
As a country, we are embarrassingly uninformed about the machinery that occupies fully one-half of our waking childhood and shapes us for the remainder of our lives. If we can get excited about an 18-hour series on Baseball, 10 hours on the Civil War and 20 hours on the Old West, there is certainly room in our collective psyche to consider the institution that shapes us throughout our youth. Yet without a context in which to examine American schooling, it is virtually impossible to understand the system we have created. Without such a context we are condemned to repeat our mistakes as we continually try to fix the symptoms rather than the causes of the problems.
Gatto, a long-time foe of compulsory education, has exhaustively documented the omnipresence in public K-12 education of the attitude expressed by Woodrow Wilson to businessmen before the First World War:
Wilson: "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
The film project is currently titled, "The Fourth Purpose" -- a reference to the Wilsonian, Prussian-style-dumbing-down priorities that, argues Gatto, have been installed on top of the three purposes that Americans have long expected schooling to pursue: To be a good person, to be a good citizen and to live the life one chooses .
Gatto: "What we are after in this film is the destruction of the pernicious school myth, which has paralyzed social justice in the United States for a century. Schooling as we know it, is a powerful expression of the sickness of this society, not a cure for that sickness."
You can learn more about Gatto's film project here. PS: Click on the "History Tour" link on the left-hand side of the home page and learn how our children were re-envisioned as "human resources."
