John Taylor Gatto. An Underground History of American Education. Rev. Ed. Michael H. Keehn, 2003. E-book.

I had a friend who would share articles he copied with others. Many times he would highlight passages with a yellow highlighter. Occasionally he’d say, “This one is so good, I just wanted to dip the whole page in a bucket of yellow ink.” An Underground History of American Education is a book that ought to be soaked in yellow highlighter ink. This is one powerful book.

Gatto’s thesis, which he exhaustively documents, is that American education in the twentieth century has accomplished precisely what people a hundred years ago were hoping to accomplish. Yes, that includes a dumbing-down and increasing dependency. Here is Woodrow Wilson:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. (1280) [All references are Kindle locations, not page numbers].

The author was for many years a middle school teacher in Harlem. He was recognized twice as a teacher of the year for New York City and once for the whole State of New York. He eventually resigned out of frustration. His resignation letter was published in The Wall Street Journal. As much as he would do things to improve his students’ abilities, the powers that be would ultimately thwart his plans and ideas. Why? he would ask. His conclusion was that the problem was systemic.

He began researching the origins of the modern public school system, starting with Horace Mann and focusing on the first four or five decades of the Twentieth Century. Things were pretty much in place by World War II and have not changed that much since.

Interestingly, part of his thesis is reminiscent of complaints we are hearing during the 2016 election cycle. Big business and big government have scratched each other’s backs for so long, and the ordinary citizen loses his rights and is forgotten. A National Education Association (NEA) director said government and business together would “accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.” (1325) This was not a complaint. This was an announcement made by the NEA in 1933 about what it hoped to do.

Gatto goes into great detail that this planning was understood to be “scientific.” As he puts it, “The entire academic community here and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time [1930] and to this contingent [the NEA] school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny.” (1431) This included “selective breeding” and outright racism like Darwin’s Descent of Man. We are reminded this was not only a time of eugenics, but even forced sterilization, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.

I recall being told by David Bradshaw, Oxford don and expert on Aldous Huxley, that Brave New World was not originally meant as a dystopia, but to give an idea of what a planned society might look like. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s, Huxley was an advocate of central planning and at the time was sympathetic to both Germany and the Soviet Union. (In fairness to Huxley, he would change, as we know both from the 1946 introduction he wrote for Brave New World as well as his 1958 Brave New World Revisited.)

One quotation from Arnold Gesell, who as early as 1909 was calling for schools to advance racial purity, was so blatantly racist that he would have been kicked off the Yale faculty if he were still there today. Yet many schools still use his techniques for screening and tracking students. Gatto puts it this way:

What gradually began to emerge form this was a Darwinian caste-based American version of institutional schooling remote-controlled at long distance, administered through a growing army of hired hands, layered into intricate pedagogical hierarchies on the old Roman principle of divide and conquer. (1500,1501)

Even since 1960, the number of elected local school boards had shrunk from over 40,000 to about 15,000 in 1998. (1688) He notes that in 1991 the New York City school system had more school administrators than the entire continent of Europe. (9037) In most places today, parents have little input or connection to their children’s education.

By 1944, a repudiation of Jefferson’s idea that mankind had natural rights was resonating in every corner of academic life. Any professor who expected free money from foundations, corporations, or government agencies had to play the scientific management string on his lute. (1506)

By 1996 Time magazine would editorialize that democracy was outmoded: “The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management.” (1512)

Despite the century-long harangue that school was the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred—wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century’s end than at its beginning…it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. (1522-28)

Gatto is an English teacher, and what he shares about literature, it sounds like he was exciting in the classroom. “I always knew school books and real books were different. Most kids do.” (1535) “Real books demand that people actively participate by asking their own questions. Books that show you best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it.” (1570)

Preach it, brother!

There is so much more. This book helped me understand things that have happened in my teaching experience. Now, all except for one year, I taught in private schools, so the students were generally treated with more respect than Gatto’s Harlem experience. Still, nearly everyone had to go through some teacher education program, and some teachers and administrators and most education professors have partaken of the elitist Kool-Aid to some degree.

An Underground History of American Education is not a conspiracy theory text. The author cites hundreds of sources. Yes, including Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and many others. He lets the founders of the system speak for themselves. The one problem with the book is that the author often does not give the references. Many times when he does, they are only partial. I recognized a few because I had read them before and knew his attribution was correct. That is a technical problem that will turn off some readers.

Gatto suggests that teachers who really motivate their students and get their students to advance are going against the grain. They may have to be subversive—in a word, the true underground. Indeed, among other recommendations that he makes, he encourages parents to try home schooling. His last chapter is worth reading to get an idea of what can work. Social engineers are not going to like it, but do we want a Brave New World or a one that respects life, liberty, and property?

I cannot help making a connection between An Underground History of American Education and C. S. Lewis’s lectures which became known as The Abolition of Man. Lewis was expressing a philosopher’s concern that many materialistic ideas rooted in speculative teachers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Carnegie, and others would result in the abolition of man. He did not mean an extinction of the human race; he meant people with no feelings or moral awareness—an awareness, for example, that they are made in the image of God, that hey have consciences, and that God has put eternity in their hearts. (See Ecclesiastes 3:11) Lewis was speaking philosophically and from history. Read Gatto and see how it is being done, how the powers that be are turning mankind into mere automata and how mankind is coming to be abolished.