John Taylor Gatto The Weapons Of The Curriculum Analysis

In Weapons of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto, suggests that through crippling imagination, discouraging critical thinking and standardization schooling is rendering the common population manageable; therefore, individuals who one way or another escaped the trap of compulsory schooling have a greater chance of forging lives of success and independence for themselves.

Chapter 1:

Assertion- Big business has a huge investment in education, destroying the bond that schooling and education have held in the past.

Proof- Andrew Carnegie, a well-known captain of industry, in his work “The Empire of Business,” said that educational schooling, “gave working people bad attitudes, it taught what was useless, it imbued the future workforce with

Gatto unfolds the story of a boy called fat Stanley whose path he crossed while working as a teacher. Stanley would only show up to class a few times a month, and curious as to why Mr. Gatto took him aside and discovered that he “had five aunts and uncles, all in business for themselves before the age of 21. His aim was to follow in their footsteps.” Fat Stanley never attended school because he was busy working, free of charge, “bartering labor in exchange for learning the businesses – and a whole lot more – working in the company of men and women who cared for him much more than any professional stranger would have.” Mr. Gatto realized that the lessons Stanley was learning outside of school, like how to face real life decisions and challenges, was far more important than the ones he was learning in school.

Personal Thoughts- Education is a life-long endeavor. Education isn’t restricted to a classroom or confided by the time restraints of the bell. Education can, and does happen anytime and anywhere. Students who attend public schools are certainly becoming well-schooled, but are they becoming well-educated? For example, take politics. There have been numerous presidential administrations packed with people that have college degrees make foolish mistakes. Were they well-schooled or

Gatto explains his experience teaching and why he’s throwing in the towel. “David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. After a few months she’ll be locked into her place forever. In 26 years of teaching rich kids and poor, I almost never met a “learning disabled” child; hardly ever met a “gifted and talented” one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by the human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of