Dumbing Us Down
In my next few blog posts, I’m going to share interesting passages from this book. I hope they will provoke both thought and discussion, and also serve as a boost to your motivation for educating your children at home.
At the risk of (or perhaps for the sake of) stirring up a bit of controversy, I’ll confess that it struck me that some of his comments regarding compulsory institutional schooling could apply to some school-at-home approaches which slavishly reproduce the institutional model without taking advantage of the freedom and individuality which home education makes possible.
During 26 years as a public schoolteacher, Gatto “began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible that I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.” (p. xii)
Let’s all consider whether our own approaches to educating our children are at risk of preventing our children from learning how to think and act, of coaxing them into dependent behavior.
Mary Jo