John Taylor Gatto on Leadership Education

[Ken H]

This article (several years old now, but totally up to date) is from a homeschool magazine. My wife clipped it for me to read, and it's VERY in synch with FOL and Leadership education.

 

You'll hear Dr. Brooks mention John Taylor Gatto now and again. He was a Teacher of the Year for his unorthodox and effective methods (discussed in this article)... and then Gatto quit to see just why the system was designed so messed up.

 

Full Article HERE on Mary Pride's Homeschool Site.

It is a good intro to John Taylor Gatto, a peek at the history of education (which we've learned lots about), and an encouragement to keep doing what we're doing.

 

Great Exerpt:

JTG: On the very first page of All Quiet on the Western Front, a German army unit is waiting to get lunch, and there's a certain amount of food set out for that unit and another unit's supposed to show up. But the other unit doesn't show up, and lunch is delayed and finally lunch is issued to this one unit. One of the guys in this unit that's eating lunch says, "Give us double rations, because these other people aren't going to come." He's going to learn that they've been killed; the whole unit's been wiped out. The cook says he can't do that, since it's against regulations, but they prevail on him and they get double rations. So you ask, "Why did the army unit get double rations as the book opens?" Let me tell you that, in 8 or 9 years of asking this, not a single kid, none of whom had less than a 12th-grade reading level, could answer the questions. That wasn't the type of question that ever was asked on a standardized test because it was asking you to make a deduction from a variety of facts.

MP: So would you say then, that reading a bunch of mystery books, in which all that you do is deduce and try to figure out what Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot, or any of these people are up to, would be good for exercising that?

JTG: Oh, yeah! You have to develop a kid's comprehensive imagination. And throughout history, although for most of human history this was legally reserved for elites, the way that's done is through literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and theology. All those disciplines require that your mind take in a complex comprehensive panorama and figure things out. It isn't the kind of primitive thinking that we call "problem-solving." Advanced thinking is, "Is that problem worth solving?" or, "If I solve that problem, and take my time and resources doing it, what exactly am I losing overall?" You're not supposed to be allowed to think that way. Policy makers are supposed to think that way. And in Germany, in Prussia precisely, in the early part of the 19th century, it was mathematically determined by high-level debate that only one kid out of every 200 should be allowed to think that way. Another ten or eleven should be allowed to learn partially to think that way. Those people would end up being the doctors, the lawyers, the college professors, the architects, and they would be the servants of the people trained in leadership thinking.