The book that is the subject of this review is that of John Taylor Gatto. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. It is a collection of various essays and speeches written by the author, who is an advocate for reform of the American educational system.
Gatto’s basic premise is that our schools do exactly what they were designed to do, and they do it brilliantly. Unfortunately, however, schools are not designed to educate anyone; rather, they are designed to mass-produce citizens, just as an assembly line might mass-produce automobiles that are almost identical in their finished products. This process does not mandate the education of the students, it simply requires their incarceration in the school system for hours a day, along with the continuation of school in the form of homework and television. In fact, Gatto also lists modern television programming as a contributor to false education masquerading as “schooling.”
Instead of receiving an actual education, students in schools follow a different type of lesson plan. Some of the lessons they learn include confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and the fact that students cannot hide. This education results in graduates who have never been given time to develop an individual personality, are unable to reflect on themselves, and whose self-esteem and self-confidence are based entirely on external factors, such as grades, gold stars, or a positive. Performance review by a superior. The constant ringing of school bells to signal a change of term also teaches students that nothing in life is worth ending, so nothing is worth starting. It’s just better to accept one’s place, even if no one can quite understand why you’ve been given the place, or what you’re supposed to do with it if no one tells you what to do.
The author also argues that the modern school system creates psychological problems in students, who end up with a life full of dependency and aimlessness. The products of the school, according to Gatto, are indifferent to the adult world and refuse to grow up, have very little curiosity, a poor sense of the future, a poor sense of the past, a mean streak directed at other students, teachers, and others, restless in any situation that requires intimacy, materialistic and incapable of facing new challenges. Of course, these problems make students the perfect product needed in an economy based on mass production and cheap labor.
In terms of solutions, Gatto recommends homeschooling with a focus on family and community engagement. Schools, social clubs, and professional organizations, being mere networks, cannot replace a child’s community and family life. No matter how many networks a person has, they will not meet their emotional needs. Gatto gives the example of asking the reader how quickly he began to forget the names of his classmates, teammates, or club members, and comparing that to the number of aunts and uncles the reader has forgotten. This is designed to reinforce the idea that family and community ties are more important to an individual’s individuality than the loose ties associated with most networks.
Gatto’s conclusion is that there is no one right way to educate people as a whole. They need to educate themselves, find their own interests, and develop their own internal processes. Mass education will only result in more mass people, who are controlled by the media and work in an economy that requires mass obedience to menial jobs. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling details the problems and solutions to the widespread psychological problems of numerous members of society, and blames squarely on the idea that mass-produced students, who have weak family and community ties and always compete for a “good grade” from a superior, who are alone, desperate and unhappy, lacking in the experience of educating themselves and indifferent to almost everything except their current environment, are the perfect finished product of schooling. As Gatto emphasizes, “education and schooling are, as we have all experienced, mutually exclusive terms.”
