With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s "guerrilla teaching."

John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).

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How ironic it is that Gatto's first two chapters contain the text of his acceptance speeches for NewYork State and City Teacher of the Year Awards. How ironic indeed, that he uses his own award presentation as a forum to attack the very same educational system that is honoring him! Gatto describes schooling, as opposed to learning, as a "twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the onlycurriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it," taunts the author.

While trapped in this debilitative system along with his students, Gatto, observed in them anoverwhelming dependence. He believes that school teaches this dependence by purposely inhibitingindependent thinking, and reinforcing indifference to adult thinking. He describes his students as"having almost no curiosity, a poor sense of the future, are a historical, cruel, uneasy with intimacy, and materialistic."

Gatto suggests that the remedy to this crisis in education is less time spent in school, and more timespent with family and "in meaningful pursuits in their communities." He advocates apprenticeships andhome schooling as a way for children to learn. He even goes so far as to argue for the removal of certification requirements for teachers, and letting "anybody who wants to, teach."

Gatto's style of writing is simple and easy to follow. He interlaces personal stories throughout the book to bring clarity and harmony to his views, while also drawing on logic and history to support his ideas about freedom in education and a return to building community. He clearly distinguishes communities from networks: "Communities ... are complex relationships of commonality and obligation," whereas, "Networksdon't require the whole person, but only a narrow piece."

While Gatto harshly criticizes schooling, we must realize that his opinions do come as a result of 26 yearsof experience and frustration with the public school system. Unfortunately, whether or not one agrees with his solutions, he has not outlined the logistics of how these improvements would be implemented. His ideas are based on idealism, and the reality of numbers and economics would present many obstacles. Nevertheless, it gives us a clear vision and a direction to follow for teachers and parents who believe in the family as the most important agent for childrearing and growth.

201 of 209 found the following review helpful:

Superb! Should be Required ReadingMay 19, 2002
By apoem "apoem"
Everyone who has something to do with children should read this book: Educators, parents, counselors and employers.

This is not a book about solutions- This is a book about recognizing the problem. As we know, recognizing the problem is the first step to correcting the situation.

This is a series of essays and speaches the author has written about education in the United States. Mr. Gatto is an award winning teacher who has taken the brave step of stating what he sees wrong with education. As only someone who has worked in the system for so long can really see the problems, he not only sees the problems, he shares them with the rest of the nation.

As a teacher who has quit to stay at home with my children, I agree whole heartedly with Mr. Gatto. As a teacher who has vowed to home school, I agree with Mr. Gatto.

Education does what it was set up to do- to teach the masses, to tame the unruly individual thinkers, and more. Mr. Gatto's seven lessons that school teaches is exactly on target. Unfortunately.
How do we change the education system? It will take a shift of thinking across the nation. This book is just a small drop in the tidal wave of events that needs to happen. Each person reading this book and acting on it only adds to the rising wave of education reform.

Truly a well thought out book written by a brave man who was willing to put his job and living on the line for what he believes.

154 of 162 found the following review helpful:

This book provides cogent arguements for homeschooling.Nov 06, 1997

John Taylor Gatto was an award-winning public school teacher when he wrote much of the text for this book. He reveals the curriculum of public schools nationwide under the headings: Confusion, Class Position, Indifference, Emotional Dependency, Intellectual Dependency, Provisional Self-Esteem, and One Can't Hide. He asserts that the true goal of childhood learning should be to discover some meaning in life...a passion or an enthusiasm that will drive subsequent learning pursuits. Instead, schools cram irrelevant facts into young minds, substituting book-knowledge for self-knowledge. This book explains a lot for anyone who got good grades, went to college, and then didn't have any idea what to do with his life. It's also a wake-up call to parents with school-age children. Do we really want our children to grow up to be good factory workers and do as they're told? Do we really want them to buy into the "Good grades=good jobs" myth? Do we want them to believe that the goal in life is to acquire more and more stuff to fuel consumerism? Or should we give them more reflective, unstructured time in childhood to find out who they are, what they like, and how they can contribute to their communities? Dumbing Us Down is a quick, worthwhile read.

61 of 65 found the following review helpful:

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!Jul 12, 1999

In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

47 of 49 found the following review helpful:

An essential challengeNov 20, 2004
By Laura Gilkey "Fox in the Stars"
I would recommend this book for anyone concerned about the problems of public, institutionalized education. It raises important challenges, the kind that are hidden in plain sight and often go unaddressed. As someone who survived K-Bacchelaureate with straight A's and psychological scars, only to learn too late that the words "Summa Cum Laude" on my degree were my reward in full, I find that many of Gatto's charges against institutional schools ring utterly true. Such schools teach their structure more than any content, and that that structure's facetious fragmentation of time and content, its pigeonholing of students by age, its usurpation of all personal privacy and dignity, and its very compulsory nature are actively hostile to the humanity and self-sufficiency we should want for students.

To me, however, Gatto's proposed solutions become problematic. His prescription is for true communities of a kind that perhaps no one I know---not even my parents and grandparents---can actually reconcile with the environment they grew up in. One friend in particular was disturbed by his proposed solutions because she was the child of a poor, single, and rather dysfunctional mother who was not well-equipped to facilitate her education without the availability of some kind of public school. Any solution to the school problem must address such situations, rather than simply trusting that all families and all communities will be functional and will meet children's needs if left to themselves.

Chapter 5, "The Congregational Principle," which focuses on proposed solutions, disturbs me most. Gatto vacillates from praising Socrates' condemnation of the Sophists for taking money to teach to espousing unleashing pure market forces on education. His exalted example is colonial New England towns that were able to achieve "true communities" through the option of excluding or oppressing undesirables. His point that these communities eventually corrected themselves from within without coercion (and the backlash it produces) is well taken, but as a liberal, I think it irresponsible to respond to the injustices of race, gender, and class by just leaving communities to their own prejudices and trusting that they'll be better a century after my death than they are now. Such triumphs of justice as Black Emancipation, Women's Suffrage, and the Civil Rights Act are, in my view, worth the fight, even if they did trump the judgement of some communities, and I don't follow Gatto's logic that immediately equates such nationwide achievements with nationally centralized school curricula that result in lifeless and mechanical schooling.

Perhaps my single biggest problem with this book is the lack of citations. I'm not prepared to take some of the author's scientific and historical assertions at face value---like a literacy rate of 98% in Massachusetts before compulsory schooling began, or the assertion that teaching the basic "three R's" takes only 100 hours with a motivated student---and feel that these need citations to investigate or confirm for myself.

Despite its problems, however, I would still call the book a "must read" for anyone with an interest in the issue. Gatto's criticisms of our schools' basic paradigm are ones we cannot afford to ignore, and although his proposed solutions may be flawed, we benefit from listening and weighing what he has to say.

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