Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Not always who you would expect, 11 Jul 2002
This is a very readable book - it isn't just modern educational thinkers like Vygotsky and Piaget, but you also find out what Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Habermas thought about education. For some reason they aren't in alphabetical order, which makes it slightly awkward to find who you want, but otherwise a great book.

Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Not always who you would expect, 11 Jul 2002
This is a very readable book - it isn't just modern educational thinkers like Vygotsky and Piaget, but you also find out what Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Habermas thought about education. For some reason they aren't in alphabetical order, which makes it slightly awkward to find who you want, but otherwise a great book.

Class and Education: A Hidden Agenda?, 06 Jan 2004
Struggling to read this highly impenetrable text, it is difficult to be certain that the 'lay' reader has grasped any central message, or messages.

In his Introduction, Ken Jones states that " ... class remains central" and rightly highlights the long term and unresolved issues around 'working class' childrens' access to higher education.

However, he is clearly keen to promote an education based (on) " ... the cultures of subordinate groups ... a resource which pedagogy and the curriculum had necessarily to take into account."

He goes on to highlight the events at the William Tyndale Junior School in the 1970s where "Teachers implemented a radical version of a progressive curriculum, centring on free choice and the celebration of unauthorised cultures."

Writing as a retired teacher who was involved for many years with children who had either not started to learn to read, or were functionally illiterate, I was constantly distressed by the fact that more 'left-wing' colleagues in the teaching profession did not consider this problem a priority.

What people do with their literacy should, of course, be their choice, but to deny them the means to make that choice seems the ultimate in elitism, from whichever end of the political or philosophical spectrum it comes.

The central conundrum remains: neither a system based on segregation at 11, nor the current one-building-fits-all-needs has resolved Ken Jones' dilemma.

Sadly, Ken, neither does Rousseau's 'Emile'.

Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Not always who you would expect, 11 Jul 2002
This is a very readable book - it isn't just modern educational thinkers like Vygotsky and Piaget, but you also find out what Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Habermas thought about education. For some reason they aren't in alphabetical order, which makes it slightly awkward to find who you want, but otherwise a great book.

Class and Education: A Hidden Agenda?, 06 Jan 2004
Struggling to read this highly impenetrable text, it is difficult to be certain that the 'lay' reader has grasped any central message, or messages.

In his Introduction, Ken Jones states that " ... class remains central" and rightly highlights the long term and unresolved issues around 'working class' childrens' access to higher education.

However, he is clearly keen to promote an education based (on) " ... the cultures of subordinate groups ... a resource which pedagogy and the curriculum had necessarily to take into account."

He goes on to highlight the events at the William Tyndale Junior School in the 1970s where "Teachers implemented a radical version of a progressive curriculum, centring on free choice and the celebration of unauthorised cultures."

Writing as a retired teacher who was involved for many years with children who had either not started to learn to read, or were functionally illiterate, I was constantly distressed by the fact that more 'left-wing' colleagues in the teaching profession did not consider this problem a priority.

What people do with their literacy should, of course, be their choice, but to deny them the means to make that choice seems the ultimate in elitism, from whichever end of the political or philosophical spectrum it comes.

The central conundrum remains: neither a system based on segregation at 11, nor the current one-building-fits-all-needs has resolved Ken Jones' dilemma.

Sadly, Ken, neither does Rousseau's 'Emile'.

Beginner-friendly guide, 24 Oct 2008
Being relatively new to the world of podcasting I was a little daunted on where to start, and how to find the information I needed. 'Podcasting for Learning in Universities' was recommended to me by a friend, and I would now like to do the same. For complete beginners, sceptics, or experienced podcasters, there are suggested routes through the book to cater for all. Therefore I felt well on my way to mastering the subject after only two chapters! Overall, I found the book to be very user-friendly and insightful. A highly recommended read!

Best in the business, 23 Oct 2008
Quite honestly, this book is the best in the business, here or in the US. Podcasting has mushroomed, in a variety of forms, but there hasn't been much research, as yet, on how to teach and learn with podcasts. The authors in this edited volume pooled their experience in several universities. Their well-told stories, plus some hard thinking about podcasts, make this book valuable reading for academics who are interested in reaching their students via audio, whether for podcasting content, advice or revision. And students can make podcasts too! Student-to-student podcasts could become very useful, it seems.

Of course, in such a rapidly moving field this volume may need updating in a year or two. For example, video will come into the picture (excuse the pun) more and more. There is soon to be published a paperback guide by Gilly Salmon and other Leicester authors on how to make podcasts. That will fill a gap that this book could not. Maybe it'll have us all reaching for our iPods.

David

Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Not always who you would expect, 11 Jul 2002
This is a very readable book - it isn't just modern educational thinkers like Vygotsky and Piaget, but you also find out what Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Habermas thought about education. For some reason they aren't in alphabetical order, which makes it slightly awkward to find who you want, but otherwise a great book.

Class and Education: A Hidden Agenda?, 06 Jan 2004
Struggling to read this highly impenetrable text, it is difficult to be certain that the 'lay' reader has grasped any central message, or messages.

In his Introduction, Ken Jones states that " ... class remains central" and rightly highlights the long term and unresolved issues around 'working class' childrens' access to higher education.

However, he is clearly keen to promote an education based (on) " ... the cultures of subordinate groups ... a resource which pedagogy and the curriculum had necessarily to take into account."

He goes on to highlight the events at the William Tyndale Junior School in the 1970s where "Teachers implemented a radical version of a progressive curriculum, centring on free choice and the celebration of unauthorised cultures."

Writing as a retired teacher who was involved for many years with children who had either not started to learn to read, or were functionally illiterate, I was constantly distressed by the fact that more 'left-wing' colleagues in the teaching profession did not consider this problem a priority.

What people do with their literacy should, of course, be their choice, but to deny them the means to make that choice seems the ultimate in elitism, from whichever end of the political or philosophical spectrum it comes.

The central conundrum remains: neither a system based on segregation at 11, nor the current one-building-fits-all-needs has resolved Ken Jones' dilemma.

Sadly, Ken, neither does Rousseau's 'Emile'.

Beginner-friendly guide, 24 Oct 2008
Being relatively new to the world of podcasting I was a little daunted on where to start, and how to find the information I needed. 'Podcasting for Learning in Universities' was recommended to me by a friend, and I would now like to do the same. For complete beginners, sceptics, or experienced podcasters, there are suggested routes through the book to cater for all. Therefore I felt well on my way to mastering the subject after only two chapters! Overall, I found the book to be very user-friendly and insightful. A highly recommended read!

Best in the business, 23 Oct 2008
Quite honestly, this book is the best in the business, here or in the US. Podcasting has mushroomed, in a variety of forms, but there hasn't been much research, as yet, on how to teach and learn with podcasts. The authors in this edited volume pooled their experience in several universities. Their well-told stories, plus some hard thinking about podcasts, make this book valuable reading for academics who are interested in reaching their students via audio, whether for podcasting content, advice or revision. And students can make podcasts too! Student-to-student podcasts could become very useful, it seems.

Of course, in such a rapidly moving field this volume may need updating in a year or two. For example, video will come into the picture (excuse the pun) more and more. There is soon to be published a paperback guide by Gilly Salmon and other Leicester authors on how to make podcasts. That will fill a gap that this book could not. Maybe it'll have us all reaching for our iPods.

David

enlightening, 23 Jul 1999
Mr.Postman did it again with his keen insight and antennas always up and working. America is a first rate country that should have a first rate school system (elementary & high school) but we don't. America's school children rank 9th in mathmatics and somewhere in science. Mr.Postman has a way of telling us wakeup before it's to late. Once again,thank you Mr.Postman

Interesting perspective!, 07 Mar 1999
Postman uses an ambiguous title that reflects the meaning of his book. The "end" may be construed as the purpose or reason for education or the end may represent his concern over the future of public education. For Postman, the survival of public education rests upon its purpose. He suggests that early purposes of education such as democracy, the melting-pot concepts, and Protestant work ethic have been lost. In addition, the "gods" of consumerism and technology have also failed. He suggests that the reader consider his five purposes for education as a means for its survival. These include his belief that education should exist so individuals become responsible for the planet earth. Another is that educators must enable their students to view knowledge in terms of a past and a future. Students must learn that mistakes are a source of learning rather than a fatality. Another is to extend the notion of the "American experiment." A love of country must be taught, and the foundation and arguments upon which this country were built should continue. Schools should teach and respect diversity; diversity should be a point of unification, not division. An understanding of language and its creation of a worldview is another purpose of education. While I found his purposes interesting, I question their being embraced and actually upheld by educators across the country. Nevertheless, Postman presents an interesting perspective!

Like all of Postman's work, necessary reading., 01 Jul 1998
So perhaps you hate to read, maybe someone has recommended this, or your professor is forcing you to read Postman, prepare yourself, your way of looking at the world we live in (modern media world) is about to change. Postman transforms everything you take for granted (television news for example) and stands it on its ear, forcing you to admit that you never really knew what you were looking at. Postman's books are for any citizen of the modern world who worries that information, and education have fat and junk food qualities that need to be curbed - indeed cut out.

Educators and parents especially should pay attention. Postman shakes your world.

Postman always makes the reader stop and go 'hmmmmm'., 07 May 1998
Postman has an uncanny ability to make everyone (no matter your background or philosophy) think about what he's saying. His writing works whether you are an academic, a student or just interested in the educational crisis. Teachers, business people, moms and dads and students should read this book. Take a minute and step outside of your preconceived ideas of what education should be and find out what it could be. Postman tells us how to make it happen. Now, let's do it.

Reading Postman: An End Unto Itself, 31 Mar 1997
So there's a lot to worry about these days. With so much that overwhelms us, it's good we have such an insightful and enjoyable commentator to articulate our anomie. I learned a long time ago to disregard any considerations of subject matter before reading any of Postman's work. I didn't consider myself particularly interested in education, but Postman never fails to turn me into a raving zealot, far more rabid and unreasonable than even Postman himself, whether it be about how we speak and write, television, childhood, or technology. (This latter viewpoint puts me in a rather difficult position because I work in computers) And here, Postman doesn't disappoint either. In the field of education, there are more ardent reformers than you could fit in a football stadium. But what do we want to reform, and how to go about it. Everybody has a different idea about it. (Compare Sizer to Hirsch to A. Bloom, for example) Postman I think makes a good case for what has been wrong with education (too much emphasis on facts rather than narrative or epistemology, creeping cultural sensitivity, and inculcating consumerism). Still, this books ends up, for me, becoming more a defense of the status quo rather than a polemic for radical change. We risk, in our dissatisfaction with the current system, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Education is best when it socializes children into the obligations of a citizen, and immunizes us against the snake-oil seductions of consumerism. Postman believes the seeds to our salvation, to harnessing the prodigious energies and good will of the young, are in finding powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives. And I wholeheartedly agree that teaching this has nothing at all to do with whether our children learn that via multimedia Pentium machines, traditional pencil and paper, or even clay slates, for that matter. The book's title, Postman tells us, is a deliberately ambiguous prophecy, meant to make us question why we have public education, as well as warn us that it may be on its way out. But along the way, Postman always lays out his arguments with entertaining examples, and an irrestistably dry wit which almost, I hope he pardons my using the term, amuses me to death. I think our culture is richer because of Postman; I just wish more people paid attention to him. As for me, I can't wait for what else he has in store.

Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Not always who you would expect, 11 Jul 2002
This is a very readable book - it isn't just modern educational thinkers like Vygotsky and Piaget, but you also find out what Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Habermas thought about education. For some reason they aren't in alphabetical order, which makes it slightly awkward to find who you want, but otherwise a great book.

Class and Education: A Hidden Agenda?, 06 Jan 2004
Struggling to read this highly impenetrable text, it is difficult to be certain that the 'lay' reader has grasped any central message, or messages.

In his Introduction, Ken Jones states that " ... class remains central" and rightly highlights the long term and unresolved issues around 'working class' childrens' access to higher education.

However, he is clearly keen to promote an education based (on) " ... the cultures of subordinate groups ... a resource which pedagogy and the curriculum had necessarily to take into account."

He goes on to highlight the events at the William Tyndale Junior School in the 1970s where "Teachers implemented a radical version of a progressive curriculum, centring on free choice and the celebration of unauthorised cultures."

Writing as a retired teacher who was involved for many years with children who had either not started to learn to read, or were functionally illiterate, I was constantly distressed by the fact that more 'left-wing' colleagues in the teaching profession did not consider this problem a priority.

What people do with their literacy should, of course, be their choice, but to deny them the means to make that choice seems the ultimate in elitism, from whichever end of the political or philosophical spectrum it comes.

The central conundrum remains: neither a system based on segregation at 11, nor the current one-building-fits-all-needs has resolved Ken Jones' dilemma.

Sadly, Ken, neither does Rousseau's 'Emile'.

Beginner-friendly guide, 24 Oct 2008
Being relatively new to the world of podcasting I was a little daunted on where to start, and how to find the information I needed. 'Podcasting for Learning in Universities' was recommended to me by a friend, and I would now like to do the same. For complete beginners, sceptics, or experienced podcasters, there are suggested routes through the book to cater for all. Therefore I felt well on my way to mastering the subject after only two chapters! Overall, I found the book to be very user-friendly and insightful. A highly recommended read!

Best in the business, 23 Oct 2008
Quite honestly, this book is the best in the business, here or in the US. Podcasting has mushroomed, in a variety of forms, but there hasn't been much research, as yet, on how to teach and learn with podcasts. The authors in this edited volume pooled their experience in several universities. Their well-told stories, plus some hard thinking about podcasts, make this book valuable reading for academics who are interested in reaching their students via audio, whether for podcasting content, advice or revision. And students can make podcasts too! Student-to-student podcasts could become very useful, it seems.

Of course, in such a rapidly moving field this volume may need updating in a year or two. For example, video will come into the picture (excuse the pun) more and more. There is soon to be published a paperback guide by Gilly Salmon and other Leicester authors on how to make podcasts. That will fill a gap that this book could not. Maybe it'll have us all reaching for our iPods.

David

enlightening, 23 Jul 1999
Mr.Postman did it again with his keen insight and antennas always up and working. America is a first rate country that should have a first rate school system (elementary & high school) but we don't. America's school children rank 9th in mathmatics and somewhere in science. Mr.Postman has a way of telling us wakeup before it's to late. Once again,thank you Mr.Postman

Interesting perspective!, 07 Mar 1999
Postman uses an ambiguous title that reflects the meaning of his book. The "end" may be construed as the purpose or reason for education or the end may represent his concern over the future of public education. For Postman, the survival of public education rests upon its purpose. He suggests that early purposes of education such as democracy, the melting-pot concepts, and Protestant work ethic have been lost. In addition, the "gods" of consumerism and technology have also failed. He suggests that the reader consider his five purposes for education as a means for its survival. These include his belief that education should exist so individuals become responsible for the planet earth. Another is that educators must enable their students to view knowledge in terms of a past and a future. Students must learn that mistakes are a source of learning rather than a fatality. Another is to extend the notion of the "American experiment." A love of country must be taught, and the foundation and arguments upon which this country were built should continue. Schools should teach and respect diversity; diversity should be a point of unification, not division. An understanding of language and its creation of a worldview is another purpose of education. While I found his purposes interesting, I question their being embraced and actually upheld by educators across the country. Nevertheless, Postman presents an interesting perspective!

Like all of Postman's work, necessary reading., 01 Jul 1998
So perhaps you hate to read, maybe someone has recommended this, or your professor is forcing you to read Postman, prepare yourself, your way of looking at the world we live in (modern media world) is about to change. Postman transforms everything you take for granted (television news for example) and stands it on its ear, forcing you to admit that you never really knew what you were looking at. Postman's books are for any citizen of the modern world who worries that information, and education have fat and junk food qualities that need to be curbed - indeed cut out.

Educators and parents especially should pay attention. Postman shakes your world.

Postman always makes the reader stop and go 'hmmmmm'., 07 May 1998
Postman has an uncanny ability to make everyone (no matter your background or philosophy) think about what he's saying. His writing works whether you are an academic, a student or just interested in the educational crisis. Teachers, business people, moms and dads and students should read this book. Take a minute and step outside of your preconceived ideas of what education should be and find out what it could be. Postman tells us how to make it happen. Now, let's do it.

Reading Postman: An End Unto Itself, 31 Mar 1997
So there's a lot to worry about these days. With so much that overwhelms us, it's good we have such an insightful and enjoyable commentator to articulate our anomie. I learned a long time ago to disregard any considerations of subject matter before reading any of Postman's work. I didn't consider myself particularly interested in education, but Postman never fails to turn me into a raving zealot, far more rabid and unreasonable than even Postman himself, whether it be about how we speak and write, television, childhood, or technology. (This latter viewpoint puts me in a rather difficult position because I work in computers) And here, Postman doesn't disappoint either. In the field of education, there are more ardent reformers than you could fit in a football stadium. But what do we want to reform, and how to go about it. Everybody has a different idea about it. (Compare Sizer to Hirsch to A. Bloom, for example) Postman I think makes a good case for what has been wrong with education (too much emphasis on facts rather than narrative or epistemology, creeping cultural sensitivity, and inculcating consumerism). Still, this books ends up, for me, becoming more a defense of the status quo rather than a polemic for radical change. We risk, in our dissatisfaction with the current system, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Education is best when it socializes children into the obligations of a citizen, and immunizes us against the snake-oil seductions of consumerism. Postman believes the seeds to our salvation, to harnessing the prodigious energies and good will of the young, are in finding powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives. And I wholeheartedly agree that teaching this has nothing at all to do with whether our children learn that via multimedia Pentium machines, traditional pencil and paper, or even clay slates, for that matter. The book's title, Postman tells us, is a deliberately ambiguous prophecy, meant to make us question why we have public education, as well as warn us that it may be on its way out. But along the way, Postman always lays out his arguments with entertaining examples, and an irrestistably dry wit which almost, I hope he pardons my using the term, amuses me to death. I think our culture is richer because of Postman; I just wish more people paid attention to him. As for me, I can't wait for what else he has in store.

Trip to Munich, 20 Nov 2007
I took this new publication to Munich along with other, older guides to the city - I found it enormously useful, better planned and more informative than the other guides. Understandably, perhaps, the authorities in Munich have somewhat toned down many of the Hitler-related sites. This book flags up important places and events that you might normally miss. I was on a reconnaisance trip for a modern history tour I'm doing for a group of sixth formers - I'll certainly use this (very portable!) book as part of the course material. Good stuff - am looking forward to the next guides.

Fascinating read, 16 Sep 2006
This book is truly amazing. The author takes us on this incredible journey
around Munich visiting old (and erased)) Nazi sites. How they can be left
in Munich is unbelievable. The flat where Hitler met Chamberlain is still
standing and happily occupied by a family. It all gave me the shudders.
These places need to be recognised and brought to our attention so that we
can learn from them; certainly not to be brushed under the carpet!

Apart from this fascinating insight into the German psyche, where the past
seems to have somewhat vanished, this book gives a potted history of the
time. Terrific! Can't wait to get to Munich and go hunting those sites.

Pre-set education results in collective stupidity, 15 Nov 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!

The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.

The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so real well? -You figure it out...

Essential reading for any freethinking person, 20 Jul 2008
John Taylor Gatto's analysis of government schooling as being a form of controlling and suppressing the masses is spot on.

I decided to home educate my kids because I didn't want school to get in the way of their education. Schools don't actually serve individuals very well at all....all they do is provide a steady supply of compliant, conformist, disempowered clone worker consumerists. They do not nurture individuality, critical thinking, love and compassion, but instead cause divisions by creating a kind of caste system where every child quickly learns their place in the pyramid, only to rise to the top by trampling on others and surrendering to rules designed to persecute anyone who deviates from conformity and obedience to the system.

If you think kids should be allowed to grow up and learn in a way that is free from any political agenda, and that the purpose of education is surely not just to raise little conformist consumers to keep the economic machine marching on, then this book is for you. Schools really aren't doing the job they are supposed to do, so maybe it's time we took things into our own hands and those of the children themselves. Kids are often way too smart for school and being held back by idiotic policies and beaurocracy and so on. Search your feelings - you know it's true!

This book has liberated my soul!, 10 Jan 2004
It sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I truly feel that John Taylor Gatto has liberated my soul by writing DUMBING US DOWN. But that is exactly what he has done. John Taylor Gatto confirms everything I had always believed about schools: that they are simply cruel prisons where spirits are destroyed and minds are conquered. Easy for me to say, though, seeing as how I myself never did too well in school. John Taylor Gatto, on the other hand, has been named Teacher of the Year several years running by both New York City and State. Here is someone accepted by the teaching establishment, honored by the teaching establishment. He speaks for me and thousands of others who've been tortured in these horrible institutions.

John Taylor Gatto reveals many fascinating, and frightening, things. For example, literacy went down in the US after the advent of compulsory schooling. Yes, more people could read and write before schooling was mandatory. Gatto says this is because reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit, but schools purposefully distort the learning process and intentionally slow down the students' learning so as to justify robbing them of 12 years of their lives while they teach what Gatto refers to as the seven lessons schools really teach:

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependency
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

It was Adam Robinson's WHAT SMART STUDENTS KNOW that first introduced me to the fact that school distorts the learning process and that if you want to be a good student you basically have to unlearn everything school teaches you about learning. It is Gatto's DUMBING US DOWN that explains *why* school distorts the learning process. The bitter truth, according to Gatto, is that mandatory schooling was invented by industry barons so as to ensure that the poor would not have a revolution, as well as to prepare their children for a transition into the industrial age. Another purpose was to shield the population from the "contamination" of the new Latin immigrants from Europe, as well as from the movement of African Americans through the country in the wake of the civil war. But Gatto doesn't stop there. He also holds compulsory schooling accountable for the breakdown of the family (he says we no longer have communities, but live in "networks"), the materialism of our society (because the only way to get any attention in a network is to buy it), and the drug use and suicide rate among our children and teens (because, Gatto says, it is absurd and anti-life to take children away from their families, trap children in a room eight hours a day, and allow them to interact only with those of the same age and social class).

The most startling point Gatto makes in this book, for me at least, is that industry barons purposefully encouraged schools to implant in students the idea that success in school is mandatory for financial success. Gatto argues that it is absurd to instill in children the idea that learning is only important if you are being graded, grades which one would want to be high so as to convert into high incomes. According to the author, rich children commit suicide at a higher rate than the poor or middle class (he suggests this is because the rich are often schooled more than the rest of us). Why try to drive home to children the idea that wealth is the key to happiness when it is common knowledge that it is not?

I myself struggled with suicidal thoughts as a child and a teen. It is directly related to the nightmare and torture of schooling. I thank John Taylor Gatto for exposing this compulsory prison for what it is, and I encourage any reader of DUMBING US DOWN to also search out Gatto's most recent book THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Andrew Parodi

Thank you, Mr. Gatto!, 12 Jul 1999
In Dumbing Us Down, Mr. Gatto gives his first person perspective on the tragic waste of human potential induced by coerced 12-year confinement of the young to the artificial and anesthetizing environment of the classroom. The book is both enlightening and frightening. Personally, I felt a sense of vindication while reading the book. It put into words my negative feelings about education resulting from my unsuccessful 15 year struggle to encourage my own children to love learning. Mr. Gatto's writing has encouraged me to think that perhaps it was a GOOD thing that school was not able to press them into its mold! At the same time, I found it immensely disturbing that a brilliant, dedicated and award-winning teacher found it impossible to convince his own colleagues that grading, grouping, numbering and force-feeding irrelevant facts to captive children has no correlation to true learning, and does, in fact, suppress any natural curiosity they may have once had. I would like to recommend the book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for those interested in looking at the larger social implications of compulsory schooling. If I had it to do over? Home schooling.

original thinker, 28 Jan 1999
John Gatto is such an original thinker. i can't get enough of his ideas. I have other stuff by him, but i wish he would put out the book about families that he talked about. This book is outstanding, especially to understand the behavior of children in school settings.

Not always who you would expect, 11 Jul 2002
This is a very readable book - it isn't just modern educational thinkers like Vygotsky and Piaget, but you also find out what Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Habermas thought about education. For some reason they aren't in alphabetical order, which makes it slightly awkward to find who you want, but otherwise a great book.

Class and Education: A Hidden Agenda?, 06 Jan 2004
Struggling to read this highly impenetrable text, it is difficult to be certain that the 'lay' reader has grasped any central message, or messages.

In his Introduction, Ken Jones states that " ... class remains central" and rightly highlights the long term and unresolved issues around 'working class' childrens' access to higher education.

However, he is clearly keen to promote an education based (on) " ... the cultures of subordinate groups ... a resource which pedagogy and the curriculum had necessarily to take into account."

He goes on to highlight the events at the William Tyndale Junior School in the 1970s where "Teachers implemented a radical version of a progressive curriculum, centring on free choice and the celebration of unauthorised cultures."

Writing as a retired teacher who was involved for many years with children who had either not started to learn to read, or were functionally illiterate, I was constantly distressed by the fact that more 'left-wing' colleagues in the teaching profession did not consider this problem a priority.

What people do with their literacy should, of course, be their choice, but to deny them the means to make that choice seems the ultimate in elitism, from whichever end of the political or philosophical spectrum it comes.

The central conundrum remains: neither a system based on segregation at 11, nor the current one-building-fits-all-needs has resolved Ken Jones' dilemma.

Sadly, Ken, neither does Rousseau's 'Emile'.

Beginner-friendly guide, 24 Oct 2008
Being relatively new to the world of podcasting I was a little daunted on where to start, and how to find the information I needed. 'Podcasting for Learning in Universities' was recommended to me by a friend, and I would now like to do the same. For complete beginners, sceptics, or experienced podcasters, there are suggested routes through the book to cater for all. Therefore I felt well on my way to mastering the subject after only two chapters! Overall, I found the book to be very user-friendly and insightful. A highly recommended read!

Best in the business, 23 Oct 2008
Quite honestly, this book is the best in the business, here or in the US. Podcasting has mushroomed, in a variety of forms, but there hasn't been much research, as yet, on how to teach and learn with podcasts. The authors in this edited volume pooled their experience in several universities. Their well-told stories, plus some hard thinking about podcasts, make this book valuable reading for academics who are interested in reaching their students via audio, whether for podcasting content, advice or revision. And students can make podcasts too! Student-to-student podcasts could become very useful, it seems.

Of course, in such a rapidly moving field this volume may need updating in a year or two. For example, video will come into the picture (excuse the pun) more and more. There is soon to be published a paperback guide by Gilly Salmon and other Leicester authors on how to make podcasts. That will fill a gap that this book could not. Maybe it'll have us all reaching for our iPods.

David

enlightening, 23 Jul 1999
Mr.Postman did it again with his keen insight and antennas always up and working. America is a first rate country that should have a first rate school system (elementary & high school) but we don't. America's school children rank 9th in mathmatics and somewhere in science. Mr.Postman has a way of telling us wakeup before it's to late. Once again,thank you Mr.Postman

Interesting perspective!, 07 Mar 1999
Postman uses an ambiguous title that reflects the meaning of his book. The "end" may be construed as the purpose or reason for education or the end may represent his concern over the future of public education. For Postman, the survival of public education rests upon its purpose. He suggests that early purposes of education such as democracy, the melting-pot concepts, and Protestant work ethic have been lost. In addition, the "gods" of consumerism and technology have also failed. He suggests that the reader consider his five purposes for education as a means for its survival. These include his belief that education should exist so individuals become responsible for the planet earth. Another is that educators must enable their students to view knowledge in terms of a past and a future. Students must learn that mistakes are a source of learning rather than a fatality. Another is to extend the notion of the "American experiment." A love of country must be taught, and the foundation and arguments upon which this country were built should continue. Schools should teach and respect diversity; diversity should be a point of unification, not division. An understanding of language and its creation of a worldview is another purpose of education. While I found his purposes interesting, I question their being embraced and actually upheld by educators across the country. Nevertheless, Postman presents an interesting perspective!

Like all of Postman's work, necessary reading., 01 Jul 1998
So perhaps you hate to read, maybe someone has recommended this, or your professor is forcing you to read Postman, prepare yourself, your way of looking at the world we live in (modern media world) is about to change. Postman transforms everything you take for granted (television news for example) and stands it on its ear, forcing you to admit that you never really knew what you were looking at. Postman's books are for any citizen of the modern world who worries that information, and education have fat and junk food qualities that need to be curbed - indeed cut out.

Educators and parents especially should pay attention. Postman shakes your world.

Postman always makes the reader stop and go 'hmmmmm'., 07 May 1998
Postman has an uncanny ability to make everyone (no matter your background or philosophy) think about what he's saying. His writing works whether you are an academic, a student or just interested in the educational crisis. Teachers, business people, moms and dads and students should read this book. Take a minute and step outside of your preconceived ideas of what education should be and find out what it could be. Postman tells us how to make it happen. Now, let's do it.

Reading Postman: An End Unto Itself, 31 Mar 1997
So there's a lot to worry about these days. With so much that overwhelms us, it's good we have such an insightful and enjoyable commentator to articulate our anomie. I learned a long time ago to disregard any considerations of subject matter before reading any of Postman's work. I didn't consider myself particularly interested in education, but Postman never fails to turn me into a raving zealot, far more rabid and unreasonable than even Postman himself, whether it be about how we speak and write, television, childhood, or technology. (This latter viewpoint puts me in a rather difficult position because I work in computers) And here, Postman doesn't disappoint either. In the field of education, there are more ardent reformers than you could fit in a football stadium. But what do we want to reform, and how to go about it. Everybody has a different idea about it. (Compare Sizer to Hirsch to A. Bloom, for example) Postman I think makes a good case for what has been wrong with education (too much emphasis on facts rather than narrative or epistemology, creeping cultural sensitivity, and inculcating consumerism). Still, this books ends up, for me, becoming more a defense of the status quo rather than a polemic for radical change. We risk, in our dissatisfaction with the current system, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Education is best when it socializes children into the obligations of a citizen, and immunizes us against the snake-oil seductions of consumerism. Postman believes the seeds to our salvation, to harnessing the prodigious energies and good will of the young, are in finding powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives. And I wholeheartedly agree that teaching this has nothing at all to do with whether our children learn that via multimedia Pentium machines, traditional pencil and paper, or even clay slates, for that matter. The book's title, Postman tells us, is a deliberately ambiguous prophecy, meant to make us question why we have public education, as well as warn us that it may be on its way out. But along the way, Postman always lays out his arguments with entertaining examples, and an irrestistably dry wit which almost, I hope he pardons my using the term, amuses me to death. I think our culture is richer because of Postman; I just wish more people paid attention to him. As for me, I can't wait for what else he has in store.

Trip to Munich, 20 Nov 2007
I took this new publication to Munich along with other, older guides to the city - I found it enormously useful, better planned and more informative than the other guides. Understandably, perhaps, the authorities in Munich have somewhat toned down many of the Hitler-related sites. This book flags up important places and events that you might normally miss. I was on a reconnaisance trip for a modern history tour I'm doing for a group of sixth formers - I'll certainly use this (very portable!) book as part of the course material. Good stuff - am looking forward to the next guides.

Fascinating read, 16 Sep 2006
This book is truly amazing. The author takes us on this incredible journey
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