How to Train Sheeple

A crash course in John Taylor Gatto's educational Machine resistance

Shepherd with a Flock of Sheep, by Vincent van Gogh

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Caveat: This post is not a critique of teachers. I have great respect for teachers who devote themselves tirelessly to challenging work. This is a critique of the educational system they must serve.

In late fall last year, a local homeschool mom posted a message on our listserv exclaiming, “Now it all makes sense! No wonder people follow authorities so blindly. Very important. A must-read.” She had just completed reading John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction. Being a homeschooler, I had often heard his name batted around, but had never taken the time to actually read his work. Several people had the book on their shelf and readily offered to lend it out, so I already had a copy of the book in hand later in the afternoon. I read all of it within a couple of days and promptly ordered my own copy so that I could mark it all up (and accidentally dribble my morning coffee over, as I tend to do my best reading at breakfast…).

The reason why it is time to crack open Gatto’s writings again is because they speak directly to Machine resistance. If you have not come across the idea of the Machine yet, I recommend you take a look at Pilgrims in the Machine and the Abbey of Misrule. We are entering an age where the fast advance of technology is knitted into increasing authoritarianism and government control, rendering us evermore captive to the Machine’s tentacles, or as Pilgrims in the Machine more eloquently states:

“The fourth industrial age technologies—we can call them the FIAT—run the risk of becoming civilization’s One Ring. Although still emerging, there is no aspect of life the new technologies will not touch and transform: money, industry, education, medicine, agriculture, travel, cities, government…If the first level of our captivity beguiled us with personal devices, and the next one conformed us by monitoring and targeting our minds, the final one could well transform us into a shriveled citizenry of techno-Gollums, clinging to our magic rings with the conviction that we are beautiful lords of power, when all we have become are sickly, withered shadows of humanity.”

While technology did not yet play a significant role during John Taylor Gatto’s time as a teacher, he was a resistor of the educational Machine before it was on anyone’s radar. He was a subversive force and presents an inspiring example of someone who did not flee, nor submit, nor wane cynical, but resisted the rigid system in ingenious ways. This post might grow a bit lengthy, but it is worth your time; if you are tempted to skim I would suggest lingering on Gatto’s quotes, which pack a punch and will provide plenty of meat to chew on. Also, please note, there are free downloads of Gatto’s work at the end of the article. So here we go…

John Taylor Gatto was a teacher for 30 years in some of the worst, and some of the best, schools in Manhattan. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years, from 1989 to 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Naturally one would think that someone who receives these awards is a grand supporter of the educational system. Yet Gatto received these awards not because he was a star within New York city school, but because he was a saboteur.

He did not follow any of the standard curricula; he bent the rules wherever he could; he worked around the system to provide students with an education that recognized them as unique individuals, not conformists. The same year he received his final award, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living."

“Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

After Gatto retired, he started on a relentless crusade to build resistance to and rejection of compulsory schooling by effectively revealing how we have been fooled into believing in the necessity of compulsory, government-run schooling. When he first started teaching, he could not understand why schools had to be “cell-block style forced confinement for both students and teachers”.

While he had been trying to figure out what was “wrong” with the system, just as an engineer would try and figure out a problem that has a solution, it suddenly struck him: what if there was no “problem” with schools? What if they were doing something “right” and following their intended purpose? What if they were succeeding in their goal to create conformists and a “manageable population”?

Gatto was determined to figure out where “this bizarre institution” had come from and had taken the shape it did all around the world all in the same century. His extensive research involved reading thousands of books, travelling three million miles around the country and the world to observe, argue, and discuss schools, all of which culminated in a behemoth book called the Underground History of American Education. He explains that a major publisher paid him an “enormous” amount of money to write it, but refused to publish it after holding it off the market for a year because it “would embarrass friends of the [publishing] house”.

Sending kids off to school seems to most parents a most natural and necessary part of childhood. Yet this is a rather new idea in the grand scheme of time: our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850.

Before then, children were generally educated at home. There was no “six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years”. Children did not attend high school but instead joined in adult life. When schooling became compulsory it was not welcomed with joy and relief. It was not popular and was resisted -sometimes with guns – by an estimated 80 % of the population. The last outpost in Cape Cod did not surrender its children until the 1880s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard. It took a full fifteen years before a second state followed Massachusetts.

While there were several relevant actors setting the tracks for compulsory schooling, it was Horace Mann who brought the Prussian school model to the Boston School Committee, which soon led to the first successful school law in US history. Long before the Prussian model was adopted around 1852, the move toward this foreign Germanic model was countered and denounced by some as “a monumental conspiracy on the part of important men to subvert the Constitution”.

It was not terribly surprising that Prussian culture played a major role, given the amount of German-speaking settlers. What Gatto notes as shocking, is that “we eagerly adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture”.

He explains that the Prussian model was deliberately designed to produce: 

• mediocre intellects

• hamstring the inner life

• ensure docile and incomplete citizens

all in order to “render the populace manageable”.

“Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about.”

John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Since the beginning of mass schooling, people were generally led to believe that the purpose of schools is to “make good people” and “make good citizens”. Gatto plainly states that this is “dead wrong”.

He refers to Alexander Inglis’s Principles of Secondary Education where the scholar, after whom a Harvard lecture in education is named, lays out the actual function of modern schooling. School was to train fixed habits of reaction to authority. It served a “conformity function” as it was to make children as alike as possible. Its aim was not, as one would hope, to fill children with knowledge and intelligence, but to:

• reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level

• to breed and train standard citizens

• produce formulaic human beings whose behaviour could be predicted and controlled

Gatto reminds us that these were not merely the ideas of an “isolated crank”, but championed by many, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who recognized the tremendous profits that could be made from a herd ready to follow and consume. At the turn of the century, when mass production was leading the way to vast fortunes, schooling on a mass scale provided ready and willing consumers.

Gatto explains that schools didn’t directly train kids to consume, “because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all”. It was the perfect forced marriage of the Machine and education, aiming to render children into straw-filled puppets.

“The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.”

John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Most of us have been trained quite effectively to believe that people without credentials or diplomas are doomed to failure. But are they really? Gatto encourages us to throw away this assumption and maintains that “degrees should not stand as proxis for education”. He maintained that the only basis of true knowledge lies in self-knowledge.

This means giving children time. Time with independent study. Time to develop private uniqueness. Time to forge self-reliance. This is at the core of “open source” learning. Gatto illustrates the concept of open source learning most effectively through some real life examples:

• A young man begins independent life by selling fish from his bicycle. He is dyslexic and has no degrees. Any guess who he is now? Ingvar Kamprad - founder of IKEA and worth 31 billion.

• A surfer bum and horrible student joins forces with a homeschooled born-again Christian. What was their achievement? Mapping the human genome.

• A four-year old learns his first lesson of independence when he gets dropped off in an unfamiliar London neighbourhood by his mother and is told to find his way home. Any guess who this high school drop-out is now? Billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who just recently launched into space on his own Virgin Galactic rocket.

Open source learning accepts that anything under the sun might be a starting point of self-mastery. In this approach to learning anyone with something to offer can teach. Most importantly, it is the students who initiate learning. This free-form education is arguably of much higher quality than rule-driven, testable schooling which fills blackboards and workbooks, crams students with disconnected information. School maintains that there is a “right way” to get educated. Open source learning maintains that there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.

“If we wanted we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receiving schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness- curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.”

John Taylor Gatto

Gatto proved that open source learning was possible not just in a homeschool setting, but in a class full of students. With his “Guerilla Curriculum” he created a personal formula that changed his students' destiny. He assembled a rich biography of every student through school records, parents, grandparents, siblings, and the students themselves, which allowed for the creation of a personal, custom-tailored course including personal wishes/weaknesses they wanted to overcome.

This may sound impossible in a large urban school but he maintains that it required only will, imagination, resourcefulness and determination to scrap the rules. For Gatto, enacting open source learning with his students meant, among many other things, helping a single eighth grade class perform thirty thousand hours of volunteer community service; securing more than a thousand apprenticeships; and sending students on expeditions across the state.

So what is Gatto’s advice on how to avoid the perils of the school system? His foremost plea is for parents to wake up to what schools really are: “drill centres for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands”, turning children into servants.

In his post on Deep Levity, Rich Tuttle observes that,

“Being unaware all but guarantees your drift down the Dark Path. That’s a feature of the Machine. It ensnares you. Cares for you until you depend upon it. Then it feeds upon you…The Machine is quickly becoming all encompassing. It’s nearly unavoidable. The battle, in this moment at least, might not be overthrowing the Machine, but it is daily, hourly even, resisting the Machine. Continually countering the deceptive spells with righteous ones.”

So how can we replace the “deceptive spells with righteous ones” in relation to the educational tentacles of the Machine?

Once one recognizes the logic behind modern schooling, there is hope to avoid its pitfalls. Gatto lays them out as follows:

• School trains children to be employees and consumers

  • Teach your own to be leaders and adventurers.

• School trains children to obey reflexively

  • Teach your own to think critically and independently.

• Well-schooled kids have a low tolerance for boredom

  • Help your own to develop an inner life so that they will never be bored.

• School avoids serious, challenging texts, instead offering pre-chewed material in bite-sized pieces

  • Urge them to take on serious, grown-up, material in literature, history, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology.

• Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone

  • Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.

Most important of all, he points out that family, not school, is the main engine of education. Gatto states that “the curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life” and that change will not come on the institutional level, but, “it can only come from defiant personal decisions by simple men and women”.

Gatto had a firm belief in the potential of every individual student: “I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt”. We need to allow our children the time and solitude they require to develop self-knowledge, and support them in pursuing knowledge so that they can have a true form of education.

Resisting the Machine can take a myriad of forms, but it must necessarily come from individuals, like you, or me, to inspire hope in our children that they are not mere cogs in the system, but can choose to reject the unrighteous spells every day, every hour, every minute.

“When we want better families, better neighbours, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far from reach of systems.”

John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Prefer audio? You can listen to my homeschool radio segments discussing John Taylor Gatto’s work on the Richard Syrett Show from Nov. 1st, Nov 8th, Nov 15th, and Nov 22nd, 2022. You can find them here (starting generally at around min. 30 to 33).

Free Downloads of John Taylor Gatto's Work

I encourage you to take a little time to read through some of John Taylor Gatto's essays , if not his tome on the history of American education, as they are certain to turn your assumptions about schooling upside down.

• Here you can download a free pdf copy of Gatto's The Underground History of American Education in which Gatto reveals the inner circle secrets of the American school system.

• Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

• The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher - This essay appeared in the Fall '91 issue of Whole Earth Review by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

• Against School - How public education cripples our kids and why, by John Taylor Gatto

• Why Schools Don't Educate by John Taylor Gatto

For those who are interested in a deep-dive into John Taylor Gatto’s ideas, I recommend The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto: