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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ I've taught public school for 26 years. But I just can't do it anymore. For years, I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids. But they had other fish to fry. So I'm going to quit, I think.

I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach. A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore. I can't train children to wait to be told what to do.

I can't train people to drop what they're doing when a bell sounds. I can't persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn't any. And I can't persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn't true. Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history.

It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren't meant to participate in our form of schooling. Rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as school teacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.

The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the faith that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid. That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its scientific presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some iron law of biology.

It's a religious idea. And school is its church. New York City hires me to be a priest. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid. Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is best served by making what is easy to do seem hard, by subordinating laity to priesthood.

School has become too vital a jobs project, contract giver, and protector of the social order to allow itself to be reformed. It has political allies to guard its marches. That's why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can't imagine school much different. 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. 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 schooling. That's the secret behind short answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn't a right way to become educated. There are as many ways as fingerprints.

We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen. That probably guarantees it won't. How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don't need more money or a longer year. They need real free market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either.

Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn. Or deliberate indifference to it. I can't teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall, I'll be looking for work, I think. The article you've just read was published in the Wall Street Journal July 25, 1991 by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year.

I've just learned the last couple days when I pulled up the Foundation for Economic Education website I learned that John Taylor Gatto passed away this past week on October 28. Gatto was somebody who was important and influential in my life because as I was wrestling with trying to fit in an analysis of some of the things that I would see in the world, I came across some of his writings.

Specifically, I came across his book called The Underground History of American Education. I proceeded to listen to a number of his talks and found him to be so informed on the subject that he helped a number of pieces to fall into place in my own thinking. And it's one of those things that long-time listeners will recognize as a consistent theme in my own opinions and in my own work.

I seek to persuade people to withdraw their children from government schools and to focus on their children as individuals and seek to help their children to become truly well-educated and competent adults rather than credentialed members of the masses. One of the common questions that I receive from listeners when I address subjects, especially inflammatory subjects such as schooling, is to say, "What does this have to do with finances?" Well, as a long-time financial planner, I've learned that parents will spend almost any amount of money on their children's college, and they'll spend almost any amount of money, if they have it, on their children's private schooling.

But very rarely will a parent sit down and read a book about education or think critically about their own educational journey. Very rarely will a parent disattach themselves from the norms of society enough to look at their own children and say, "How can I spend our money to enable my child's education in the way that's best for my child?" And it's for this reason that I feel justified in beating this bell because parents are rightly concerned about their children's educational outcomes, and parents are right to dedicate their money toward this end.

And yet, many parents don't even know where to start, and they waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on credentialization in the mainstream school system that doesn't serve their child well. Now, I'm grateful to see that many things have been changing in the past years. I see more and more parents who are willing to slow down to read a book and to study and to think.

I see more and more parents who are willing to change their life and lifestyle to meet the needs of their children. That's my hope that by sharing these ideas with you, I can help you to more effectively invest the money in your child's education. Because the most effective investments are not my telling you which funds to put into your 529 plan or which state's 529 plan to participate in.

But my best way to actually get to the root of the matter is to help you rethink the whole idea of a 529 plan. The problem is this. As a parent, you feel tremendous pressure to go along with your peers. You feel tremendous pressure to go along with what's normal.

You feel tremendous pressure to fit in. And so in order for you to go against that and to make unique individual decisions for your life and for your family, you will need a huge amount of self-confidence. You will probably need to do a significant amount of research and you will need confidence that's wrought from education for you to go in a different direction.

As no doubt you can hear, I continue to experience a weakness in my voice and so I'm not operating at 100%. And so this week I'm going to just release a couple of audio files for you from John Taylor Gatto. I'm going to release this file that you'll hear.

I also intend to release a relatively short one hour lecture that he delivered called A Short Angry History of American Education. It will save you a reading of several hundred pages and give you kind of an overview. I also intend to release to you a fairly lengthy file which was recorded by Richard Grove back in 2011 before Gatto suffered a stroke called The Ultimate History Lesson.

Now depending on your learning style you may find those files very dense. Gatto is not a linear presenter. He's more of, I'm not sure the word to use, but it doesn't go bing bing bing bing bing from one point clearly to the next. So it's one of those things where you need some familiarity with the concepts to follow the threads.

But I'll release it to you here in an audio form in case you, in hopes that it will serve you. That at least you can listen to the content and you can go from there and follow the resources out if you want. I'd like to read you Gatto's obituary that was published in the, again, the Foundation for Economic Education because I think it gives the uninitiated a good insight into who he was.

John Taylor Gatto, 1935 to 2018. Remembering America's Most Courageous Teacher. Gatto leaves behind a legacy that inspired thousands of people to challenge the premise on which our education system was built. This obituary is by Brittany Hunter. It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the passing of a revolutionary educator, John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto spent nearly 30 years as a teacher in the infamously rough New York City public school system. He was awarded New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years while also being recognized as New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Over the course of his career, Gatto was recognized by other educators for the rapport he had built with his students.

While other teachers were spending much of their day on behavioral management issues, Gatto's students were actively engaged in his lectures and genuinely excited about learning. When faculty members would come to him seeking advice, his prescription was simple. Treat your students the same way you'd treat anyone else. Above all, Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents to share with the rest of the world.

They didn't want to be talked down to, but longed to be treated with respect and dignity. He recognized that their worth was not determined by the neighborhoods where they lived, their parents' annual salaries, or the scores they received on standardized tests. He concluded that "genius is as common as dirt.

We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves." After three decades in the classroom, Gatto realized that the public school system was squashing individualism more than it was educating students and preparing them for the real world.

To make matters worse, his later research would reveal that this dumbing down was not just by accident, but by design. Feeling the education system was beyond repair, Gatto could no longer, in good conscience, be an active participant. Rather than sending his letter of resignation to his superiors in his school district, he sent a copy of "I Quit, I Think" to the Wall Street Journal where it was published as an op-ed on July 25, 1991.

In his biting resignation, he wrote, "I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach—a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

I can't train children to wait to be told what to do. I can't train people to drop what they're doing when a bell sounds. I can't persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn't any. And I can't persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples.

That isn't true." Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system. He wrote several books on his experience in the classroom, including "Dumbing Us Down, the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" and "Weapons of Mass Instruction, a School Teacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling." His book, "The Underground History of American Education" is perhaps the most accurate and damning history of the American education system that has ever been written.

Gatto encouraged parents to foster an environment where their children could follow their bliss rather than being stuck in a classroom, trained to be just another cog in the machine. He inspired teachers to reassess their reasons for becoming educators and to challenge the status quo. He was also a firm believer in self-directed education, sometimes referred to as "unschooling." He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow.

He wrote, "Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community. Interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing. Ridicule them and they will retreat from human association.

Shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly." Author and ardent unschooling advocate, Kerry MacDonald, had this to say of Gatto's legacy in this regard, "John Taylor Gatto's writings inspired a generation of parents and educators to question deep-seated beliefs about compulsory mass schooling and pursue alternatives.

For homeschoolers in particular, Gatto affirmed the vital role of family and empowered parents to take back control of their child's education. His words will continue to have a lasting impact on education for years to come." Zach Slaback, who authored "The End of School" and wrote the foreword to Gatto's newest edition of "Dumbing Us Down" also had a few remarks on Gatto's legacy.

Gatto's writing, teaching, and approach to not just education, but human flourishing in general, inspired me to think critically about my own life and education. He's one of the most important thinkers in American history. That's becoming more obvious every day. He'll be missed dearly. Slaback also said he carries a card in his wallet with this John Taylor Gatto quote, "You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you become an unwitting actor in somebody else's script." On October 25th, after a long battle with health issues, Gatto departed this world at 82 years old.

He has survived by his loving wife and two children. In addition to his family, he leaves behind a legacy that inspired thousands of people to challenge the premise on which our education system was built and to protect a child's right to a real education built on actual experience rather than government-sanctioned texts.

So as we honor the life of this great man, I'll leave you with a few of Gatto's most inspirational quotes. School is a 12-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it, I should know. It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class.

That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety. Indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present, much the same way television does. It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its homework.

How will they learn to read, you ask? And my answer is, remember the lessons of Massachusetts. When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cell blocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one-day variety or longer, these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of "school" to include "family" as the main engine of education.

If we use schooling to break children away from parents, and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650, and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts school in 1850, we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist. It should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life. It should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with.

It should teach you what is important, how to live, and how to die. I want to close today's show with reading to you a short excerpt from one of John's talks where he discusses the purpose of schooling. This talk has been reworked into a fairly popular YouTube video, but the creators of the video put a bunch of music underneath it, and I couldn't find, I didn't find it to add much, and I couldn't find a recording of it without the music.

And so I've decided just simply to read to you the transcript. So again in closing, this is John Taylor Gatto speaking on the purpose of schooling. School was intended on this continent to be as it had been in northern Germany, a fifth column into the burgeoning libertarian condition where disenfranchised and oppressed groups were clamoring for some kind of seat at the bargaining table.

School was to be a surgical incision into which the class-based management theories of England were to be inserted to interdict the liberty traditions. England's multi-layered social class is simply a modern-day representation of Julius Caesar's advice that when you are overwhelmed by the enemy, you divide them and conquer them that way by setting them against each other.

The method was to be by infiltration into the minds of children out of sight of their parents. The well-read here won't be shocked. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to Frederick of Prussia knew and taught explicitly that if children could be kept childish beyond its term in nature, if they could be cloistered in a society of children without any real responsibility except obedience, if their inner lives could be attenuated by removing the insights of history, literature, philosophy, economics, religion, if the imminence of death and the certainty of pain and loss could be removed from daily consciousness, if the profound reflections on one's own death could be replaced by the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, young people would grow older but they would never grow up, and a great enduring problem of supervision would be solved.

For who can argue against the truth that childish and childlike people are much easier to manage than critically trained, self-reliant ones? Now you are ready to hear the six purposes of modern schooling taken directly from Dr. Anglis' book. The first function of schooling is "adjustive." Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.

It is fixed habits of reaction. Notice that this precludes critical judgment completely. Notice too that requiring obedience to stupid orders is a much better test of function 1 than following sensible orders ever could be. You don't know whether people are reflexively obedient unless they will march right off the cliff.

Second is the "diagnostic" function. Each school is to determine each student's proper social role, logging the evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. You probably thought that the kid or a parent or neighbors, the region or circumstances. No. The school is to determine your proper social role, and they are to fix you in that role mathematically on their cumulative records.

Next comes the "sorting" function. School sorts children by training individuals only so far as their likely destination in the social machine, not one step beyond. Keep in mind, you're not listening to John Gatto. You're listening to the man for whom the Honor Lecture in Education at Harvard is named.

The fourth function is "conformity." As much as possible, kids are to be made alike. Whatever the background they come from, they are to be made alike. This is not done from any passion for egalitarian ideals, but so that their future behavior will be mathematically predictable in service to market research and government research.

Next comes the "hygienic" function. This one is my favorite. This has nothing to do with individual health, but it has a lot to do with the health of the race. At least as Anglis or Darwin or his first cousin, Galton, saw it. Hygiene is a polite way of saying that school is expected to accelerate natural selection by tagging the unfit so clearly by humiliation—that's what all those humiliations from first grade on rankings are all about—so clearly that the unfit will drop from the reproduction sweepstakes, either in despair or because their likely mates will have accepted the school's judgment of them as terminally inferior.

And last comes a fancy Latin word, the "propaedutic" function. That's fancy word meaning that a small fraction of lucky kids will quietly be taught how to take over management of this continuing project. Guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle.

It's that low-down nitty-gritty common purpose—not Marxist grand warfare between classes and greedy captains of industry. It's simply so that management will have a minimum of hassles. With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite. Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger Brand has all your favorite things. Ralphs, fresh for everyone. (dramatic music)