It’s not unusual that some of the most ardent school reformers are former educators. But it is unusual if they’re arguing not to reform school but to get rid of it.
But that’s John Gatto. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as a three-time New York City teacher of the year, and who became known for using the occasion winning New York State’s teacher of the year award in 1991 to announce his resignation from the profession because he no longer believed in compulsory education.
Even more unique are his reasons. Gatto’s thinking and writing – which proliferated upon his retirement – is a bracing mixture of historical perspective, hardcore and hard-to-classify political invective, and slice-of-life stories of hope and inspiration. Gatto’s an onion; keep peeling back the layers and he’ll more and more convince you that his criticism of public schools is one of the strongest, if most cynical, that you’ve ever read, one that deserves to be taken seriously.
Gatto’s critique of compulsory schooling – particularly in some of his most potent work, such as his short essay, “Against School” – is classic Rousseauian analysis of the harm that institutions wreak upon children. Schools are boring, they destroy curiosity, they infantilize, keeping kids locked into a permanent childhood, robbing them of authentic and meaningful opportunities for self-development and growth. The familiar prison and factory comparisons are there, criticizing the institutions, as well as the criticisms of the underlying philosophy of standardization and compulsion. “Overteaching interferes with learning,” (191), he writes. Again and again one encounters some variation of Mark Twain’s famous line about not letting his schooling get in the way of your education, or Rousseau’s belief that children learn best at their own pace. “Good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone to make its own curriculum,” Gatto writes (175).
Within this wider Rousseauian attack on the institution, there is a distinctive Marxian element as well. For Gatto, not only do schools hurt children, but they were designed to – by economic elites trying to create and maintain an unequal, unjust society – politically divided, citizens made docile, passive consumers of corporate products and governmental authority. Gatto sees this as originating during the early 20th century by an alliance of ed reformers and capitalist magnates, who saw schools as a way for elites to control the population by creating at best, efficient machines for sorting citizens into their proper station in life. He’s a student of educational history, too, and his examples and instances are deeper and richer than most reformers who write in this vein.
Gatto’s credibility is at once enhanced and undercut by his public school bona fides. On the one hand, you have to listen to him because he’s a lifer, a veteran: Here is no slick, upwardly-mobile 37 year-old reformer with a Ph.D. and a consulting gig, trading on his eleven months in TFA; Gatto is a public school warhorse who served thirty years in New York City middle schools. It’s safe to say he knows what he’s talking about.
But at the same time, it’s easy to imagine that Gatto stayed on too long, his cynicism a natural response to a job that was obviously constraining him. He’s like the bitter old vet who’s now unmuzzled, firing with both guns blazing, but this perspective can say just as much about the man as it can the system. In Gatto’s case, I think it’s both: at times he is illuminating, at others cranky and cynical.
He’s not a reformer either. He does not think the modern system of compulsory public education is reformable. Although he recognizes the dramatic power schools have to shape society – witness his Marxist criticism of schools as means of elite control – his vision of society is quite different than what one expects from modern school reformers, most of whom at heart subscribe to a vaguely-John Dewey-ian, Progressive/modern view of a democratic but also technocratic society, in which reason and science can solve public problems, and schools must become microcosms of and laboratories for this democratic, ever-shifting environment.
Even among the politically left / progressive reformers, there is of course the lasting debate between the pure child-centered, existentialist school reformers who advocate less imposition, more freedom, individualization, and the like; and the politically-minded social reconstructionists / Critical pedagogues who believe in more deliberate use of curriculum and method to foster political equality. Some of these reformers go as far as calling for economic socialism, others simply want a fairer capitalistic meritocracy. Either way, their social ideal is some better future – something fairer, more humane, more “equitable,” something we haven’t seen yet – but which we can create through schools.
Gatto’s social ideal is set in a past he’d like us to return to. His social vision, as outlined in his fascinating essay, “In Defense of Original Sin,” is embodied in not just small town life, but in a small town congregation – specifically in the tradition of dissent, independence, and local decision-making found in a 17the century Congregational undertaking called The Salem Procedure – the assuming into their own hands of religious responsibility from the central authority of the church by English Puritans just settled in Salem, Massachusetts in 1629. This he calls “an act of monumental localism” (173) in which parishioners “challenged the right of arrogant rulers to disseminate their version of the truth without its facing review by the American people” (173). He admires this Congregational model in part because he, like many conservatives in the tradition of Edmund Burke, sees best-adapted wisdom as inherently local. Gatto chafes at “a century and a half of increasingly suffocating ‘expert’ intervention” (174) and venerates the early Puritans for allowing “lay people picking their own experts and keeping them on a very short tether” and because it “draws from a well of common-sense wisdom found among people who actually work, rather than talk, for a living – small farmers, craftspeople, teamsters, artists, fishermen, loggers, small entrepreneurs . . .” (174-5). Like Burke’s “little platoons,” Gatto appreciates the small, local groups that serve to solve their own problems – with an organic efficiency that top-down requirements cannot match. “He writes, “The American genius was to locate wisdom in ordinary people” (175).
Even though one can imagine John Dewey appreciating Gatto’s emphasis on voluntary, local associations, as well as his refusal to accept established authority on given topics, nevertheless Gatto objects to the kind of scaling-up represented in Dewey’s public inquiry. Dewey, as opposed to Burke, does not seem satisfied with local control. Although Dewey is clearly a situationist – believing staunchly that there is no one Platonic / idealistic best solution to thorny public problems, he is at heart a strong believer in social progress through science – a constant checking and rechecking of parochial solutions to practical problems until they’ve run up against the limits of their effectiveness. Dewey’s “public” (I am thinking of his wonderful book, The Public and Its Problems) is always trying to talk to wider and wider groups, to as large an audience as the situation warrants. Groups must continue to interact with as wide an array of other groups as possible, and they must be – as he reminds us in Democracy and Education – porous, allowing their members as free a reign as possible to range across other groups. Any insularity, for Dewey, is stagnation. The kind of localism that many conservative thinkers champion is, I think for Dewey, a kind of failure in the health of the natural ecosystem.
This extends in a way to individualism, a theme that Dewey always seems to downplay. The individual, for Dewey, is not only a social being, but a socially created being. There are no self-reliant hermetic geniuses in Dewey’s thought; one only develops through social interaction. Yes, his vision of a participatory society is wide and optimistic, but it still has little place for the refuge of the village farmer, content with his own methods and suspicious or simply not interested in new ideas. Dewey’s farmer is a technocratic problem solver, an enthusiastic driver of the newest tractors, not a luddite living off grid. For Dewey there’s nothing wrong with technocratic experts (like himself) steering the ship of state, so long as they’re overseeing a wide-open, egalitarian system of public participation.
Gatto objects to Dewey’s emphasis on the primacy of society over the individual. This he terms Dewey’s “new individualism” – a sham because it is merely the appearance of freedom and choice. To Gatto, Dewey is just another central authority figure trying to drag local communities into the nets of his compulsory program of social participation. Yes, Dewey likes to see groups solving problems together, but for Gatto this focus on inquiry is merely “a therapeutic strategy” (129) designed to mask its real purpose, the movement toward a “centrally designed social goal.”
Gatto is especially critical of government experts because they undercut the family. Gatto writes that for Dewey, there was a “sharp divide between a past where family enterprise and individual effort were the main agencies of personal definition, and a future where institutions would do that better” (121). “The old family is dead,” he quotes Dewey as writing; the “opportunities, choices and actions of individuals are more and more defined by corporate associations . . .” (121).
These are fair criticisms. Dewey did embrace the new industrialism – and wrote some of the most moving, charitable, hopeful accounts of how we might reconcile ourselves to it – and he was if nothing else a Progressive – always wanting to move forward, always feeling as though life could be improved through rational expertise. And in Dewey’s presentism, his distrust of history, his downplaying of the individual, and in his distrust of an enduring concept of human nature, there is a kind of technocratic soullessness, a kind of disorienting lack of a humanistic center to his Pragmatism. The developmentalism he writes about so movingly in observing just when, the precise moment, that a child is ready to learn is undercut to some extent by the impression one gets that Dewey believes so deeply in Darwinism that he truly believes human beings are in constant evolution. Perhaps, his work seems to say, we must closely observe children and students because human beings are evolving so quickly that this new generation will show markedly different tendencies.
Gatto not only objects to Dewey’s compulsion, but to his secular rationalism. Again, this was surprising to me, because it’s not usually something you read from ed reformers. But the thing is — Gatto is clearly religious. He’s not just admiring the Congregationalists because they were independent and salty; he truly believes that religion gets at something we need in our souls (and which schools, in their worship of reason, cannot minister to). In an extended passage in his essay on original sin, Gatto contrasts the narrow, sterile rationalism of modern science with the more nourishing and wholesome wisdom of Christianity. Specifically, he believes that modern society has banished the notion of original sin, an enduring dilemma to which human beings require answers. Religion provides meaning and purpose in human lives, characteristics which our modern society in general and schools in particular, agents as they are of Enlightenment reason, do not, in Gatto’s view, address.
As a side note, Gatto’s belief in the enduring nature of original sin is an interesting counterpoint to his Rousseauian belief in the inherent good of natural development. The best I can tell is that Gatto seems to resolve this apparent tension by encouraging a kind of do-it-yourself, learn-the-lessons-that-Christianity-teaches program to be undertaken by each individual, in some sort of classic Protestant, authority-less fashion. Again, it’s an interesting tension – and part of what makes Gatto such an interesting thinker.
Given all of this – his insistence on the importance of religion, the family, localism, the rejection of control by a central authority – it wasn’t surprising for me, as I began to read him more, to learn that Gatto ran for public office in New York as a conservative, that his essays were published in the Wall Street Journal, or that he was honored by libertarian organizations. That I was surprised to realize he was a conservative says something interesting about the nature of modern political affiliations. It’s not that I don’t read conservative reformers, but Gatto’s Rousseauianism and especially his quasi-Marxism initially threw me off the track. But his anti-elitism doesn’t veer toward egalitarian reform; it shades into libertarianism:
“We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen — that probably guarantees it won’t.”
In his famous essay “I Quit, I Think” he sounds like a modern republican reformer:
“Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”
He wants to, echoing Ivan Illich, deschool society. And like the deschooling critiques of his predecessors, Gatto’s critique essentially amounts to a return to finding an education out in the marketplace (in the small village perhaps, but still in the marketplace):
“How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum, or national testing either.”
Illich explicitly embraces Milton Freidman’s concept of educational choice; Gatto is probably best identified under the movements of homeschooling, which he repeatedly advocates for, and the broader “unschooling” movement, which has a rich tradition of pushing for families to be allowed to choose any opportunities for their children’s educations, formal or informal, as they wish.
Either way, given the above, it’s hard to understand why it took me so long to realize Gatto was a conservative. Typically conservative attacks come in the name of excellence and standards, rather than from Rousseauian naturalistic belief that we’re stifling children, or from a Marxist indignation at elite control. What’s also striking is that what finally tipped me off as to Gatto’s true allegiances was his call for “freedom” for children – freedom to leave the system. As I think about it, the notion of “freedom” itself is rarely employed by the left. It’s a conservative goal; liberals vastly prefer “equality.” In fact, it sometimes seems as though to them the very concept of freedom seems suspicious; the left is far more interested in using the levers of public schools for social reconstruction – a bringing everyone together in order to promote equality – than they are in letting people do their own thing. In this sense the left is still Deweyian: schools are our laboratories, and deciding you don’t want in on this noble and important project is viewed with suspicion.
It is interesting because not that long ago – in the 1960s, for instance – leftist (sometimes called “Romantic”) critics were calling for the very same deschooling or homeschooling or un-schooling or free-schooling that Gatto calls for from the right. The school system, for many thinkers and writers at that time, was too oppressive to save, so children should leave. But today it seems to me that there are very few – if any – influential reformers on the left who advocate even homeschooling, let alone unschooling.
And this is where the many, many possible critiques of Gatto’s perspective begin. The left’s evolution from Romantic criticism to a return to social reconstructionism (reborn as Critical Pedagogy in the 1980s) begins with the basic assumption that we as a people have a responsibility through our social institutions to promote fairness of opportunity, and more importantly fair access to education. Gatto’s entreaties that the country was just fine, just as literate and able to hold forth in civic debate, thank you very much, as we need to be – back before compulsory schooling – ring very, very hollow to the same Marxist or latter-day Marxist reformers (or frankly even moderate, centrist Jeffersonians) who believe that public schools are designed to make accessible the knowledge that allows economic and social mobility. In short, Gatto’s unschooling would quickly come under fire from his very same anti-elite bedfellows in that – and this is basic, basic stuff – its marketplace-based educational system would allow only the rich kids access to academic learning and knowledge.
Dewey’s genius, in my view, was that he rounded off and made more reasonable (for our own times, anyway) Rousseau’s program of wait-until-they’re-ready developmentalist learning. It’s just not practical for – as Rousseau called for – a child’s own father to be his primary teacher (even Emile is educated by a full-time, paid-for tutor). There’s surely a lot to Gatto’s vision of localism, local control (which is something surprisingly popular with the left in many places), but clearly the United States of 1840 was a deeply unequal place, and any reformer of any conscience has to come up with realistic ideas for how to avoid that. “Let them manage themselves” is not a realistic response.
To argue, for instance, that parents know what’s best for their own children is one thing, but to argue that it would be better to simply offload the responsibility for education to families is to wish to return to a past that does not exist. One glimpse at the school buses delivering lunches to needy district families during the COVID shutdown period reminds anyone who saw it of the dramatic custodial responsibilities that schools have assumed in our society. To abdicate that role, even gradually, would be to consign many young people to the dimly lit trailer instead of the well-lit classroom, to the wolves of social media instead of to books, and to “learning” behind the checkout counter at Walmart. To argue, as a Marxist might, that we must improve economic conditions for all so that there are no dimly-lit trailers is one thing; but that is an extensive, complex, many-layered economic and political argument to which any debates about schools are almost a small tack-on. But to argue, as Gatto might, that American students are learning less in schools than sitting in front of the TV, captured in social media, or working behind the checkout counter is cynical to the point of eccentricity, a metaphorical throwing up of one’s hands after a long and frustrating teaching career. And it is perspective that, the national debate about schools aside, would surely have lower approval ratings among American parents and citizens than that of even our current president.
Still, there’s always something important about the libertarian perspective. In my view it has less to do with the failures of our erstwhile institutions than it does about how we might answer the big, basic questions: What kind of society do we want to be? What are our rights as citizens? What should be the role of the government in the ideal state? Libertarian answers to these questions, particularly when they concern so-called “negative freedoms” that citizens enjoy, freedom from government restrictions, are always compelling and illuminating to me. I’m in the midst of reading Robert Nozick’s famous response to John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice – Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia – and I’ll have to do a subsequent blog post about it. I bet Gatto would appreciate it.
Meanwhile, I have a lot of respect for a thinker like Gatto. His work is less meaningful as a realistic alternative to compulsory schooling, for me, than as a memorable challenge to public ed that we must keep in mind. His Marxism, as I learned, is something of a red herring; it’s his Rousseauian challenge – that schools are hurting children and holding them back from their full development – that constitutes a clear perspective that schools must always reflect on. Gatto is constantly raising the argument that many great Americans succeeded despite no formal schooling, and the counterargument – that many Americans have succeeded precisely because of formal schooling – is certainly a compelling rejoinder. Yet the best argument for compulsory schooling is even more simple. As in all instances like this, the best answer to the man’s critiques is the man himself:
John Gatto is a product of compulsory public schools.
And John Gatto is an original.