John Taylor Gatto Talk

I wanted to type up some notes about the John Taylor Gatto talk the other night. It was kind of boring at times, but it was good. He likes to talk and would often go off on tangents. He told about one class he talked to for six hours because nobody told him to stick to the script.

He looked a lot older than I was expecting. I guess I only knew him from a picture on the cover of his book, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling, which was published 8 years ago. He's 75 years old, has diabetes, and is a Roman Catholic.

Here are some more notes:

1) There is no correlation between standardized test scores and intelligence/being a success later in life. Hundreds of attempts have failed to find any value in testing and this has been kept from the public.

2) This is something our culture doesn't want students to know, because then they can't control students. He was giving a talk to high school students in New York and was telling them this, when, 10 minutes later, cops came in and told him that if he didn't leave the school immediately, they would arrest him. The teachers apparently called the superintendent, who called the cops to have him removed so kids wouldn't hear any more. (He writes about stuff like this more in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction, which I haven't read yet.)

3) He said that National Merit Scholars commit suicide more than any other group because they are used to privilege within this group, but is then met with a world that doesn't care about their achievement.

4) He talked about how Henry Ford marginalized the Jews (read: The Dearborn Newspaper) and that Adolf Hitler had a giant poster of him because of this. (I forget how this was connected to anything. It was probably a tangent. I think it had something to do with our universal forced schooling originated in Germany.)

5) Darwin's The Descent of Man talks about how 90% of the population is evolutionary trash and that they should be weeded out or we'll all evolve backwards. After the publication of this book, the emergence of country clubs shot up by the hundreds, as well as elite colleges.

6) There are three places that jobs come from: 1) The government creating jobs, 2) Giant corporations, and 3) Creating your own job.

So, that was the gist of it, kind of, sort of, but probably, not really. There was really a lot of stuff that he went into which somehow connects everything that I cliff-noted here.

After the talk, I mulled around him with some other Gatto groupies, who were asking him questions. I was too shy to ask him anything (as per my usual agenda), but it was neat being in his presence.

Here is the talk: