john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction

Weapons of Mass Instruction 103
As for mysel£ I became determined to figure out where this bizarre
institution had actually come from, why it had taken the shape
it did all around the world in the same century, why it was able to turn
away intense criticism and grow larger, more expensive, and more intrusive
into personal lives. If you allow imagination to work on the institution,
it is much more a piece of utopian science fiction, oblivious
to human needs, than it is a response to popular demand. Right from
the early days of my teaching life, I began a project of research which
involved reading and arguing with thousands of books, many dreadfully
written and some quite obscure, travelling (by now) three million
miles around the country and the world to observe, argue, and
discuss schools and which resulted a few years ago in a monster book,
still in print, called The Underground History of American Education.
A major publisher paid me an enormous amount of money to write
it (enormous for a schoolteacher) and then refused to publish it after
holding it off the market for over a year. "It would embarrass friends
of the house;' I was told. If you wonder what that might mean, consider
this was one of the top three textbook publishing houses too,
apart from their trade division.
In this way my schoolteaching practices were directed by intense
research on the one hand, and equally intensive and daring field exercises
around the city of New York - at times up to sixty different
studies in sixty different locations! Simultaneously! Either singly, in
small teams, or en masse, "Gatto's Guerrillas;' as we called ourselves,
infiltrated without notice (or permission either), into public meetings,
exhibitions, scheduled hearings, auctions, courthouses, workplaces
- anywhere opportunity presented itself. We took public
opinion polls on every subject under the sun - often competing with
professional news organizations. Travelling dramatic troupes (always
more than one) gave shows in elementary schools, in acting studios,
and everyplace verbal engagement was possible.
The general targets were many: independence, self-reliance, strategic
planning, a good command of the active literacies of speaking and
writing, courage, curiosity, an ability to write a script for one's own life.