An Interview with John Taylor Gatto (Teacher of the Year (New York ...

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Martin: What do you know about Goals 2000? Is this the so-called Outcome- Based Education? Gatto: It‟s a confluence of powerful interests who don‟t necessarily like each other, who have been scrambling for sovereignty of the school institution. For, unbeknownst to the rest of us, it has become the center of the American economy. In most of the small towns and in medium size cities, the school industry is the big business. What appears to be the school budget in large cities is only a fraction of the school budget, because money is generated and flows into the school institution from every division of the American government but doesn‟t show up in the budget. Martin: You mean there is a black budget for the school system? Gatto: Let‟s think of it this way. It‟s a black budget but it doesn‟t necessarily have to be like the defense department who spends billions of dollars on schools to conceal the fact you‟re doing that from general scrutiny. The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, all have a substantial stake in American schooling. The average informed person only sees the Tax Levy budget. So when New York City says that X amount of dollars are being spent per kid, they‟re giving you the minimal figure they possibly can. Martin: As far as “Goals 2000”, is what you are saying is that people are fighting over the pie now?
Gatto: The big business of the United States is to school the young so that all the rest of the aspects of the social engine won‟t be destabilized. It‟s the major business. What the average parent thinks of as the purpose of schooling hasn‟t been for many years, and probably hasn‟t been for this whole century, although there was more resistance in some places than in others. So: the development of the mind – which probably comes to the mind of the average person who thinks about schooling – is antagonistic to Goals 2000. It‟s antagonistic to any stated goals of schooling from any source at all in this century. This is certainly deliberate. Martin: What they say they are going to do is to allow mixed grades, be “task oriented” and be “project based” rather than curriculum-oriented. Gatto: The difficulty with that kind of an abstraction is that you‟ve got to see the translation to really understand what‟s going on. One of the things this apparatus has done successfully decade after decade is to borrow the terminology of its opposition. It‟s fascinating. When I first heard about it I would have thought you‟d be a lunatic to not judge the value of a schooling plan by its outcome. But then I saw some of the lists of outcomes that would be aimed for and I said, “but those are political outcomes.” They are mixed in. Each time the opposition would win the field for the day, they would mix in more conventional outcomes. It‟s a semi-serious rhetorical statement, but what hides behind it is a pretty frightening concentration of forces that have at times been antagonistic.
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Page 5 and 6: named Wilhelm Wundt at the Universi
Page 7 and 8: law of 1819 but they don‟t work.
Page 9 and 10: including Horace Mann, traveled to
Page 11 and 12: Mann is not a principal; Mann has n
Page 13 and 14: professional staff. There are no pr
Page 15 and 16: It‟s based on Francis Bacon‟s i
Page 17 and 18: said this scheme of the agents of t
Page 19 and 20: Boston paper said every third “Mi
Page 21 and 22: work against it. Ultimately they‟
Page 23 and 24: through during the last 30 years is
Page 25: - April, 1994

An Interview with John Taylor Gatto (Teacher of the Year (New York ...

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