Contrarian: John Taylor Gatto
Kids are naturally curious. Why do we stamp it out?
You'll find context for this post, which is part of a short series, here.
Gatto is one of the crustiest contrarians I've had the pleasure to meet. We met for coffee on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1990s. He recommended I read Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, which turned out to be the first good history book I ever read. Later, he was a guest on a panel that I hosted — which he effectively took over.
Gatto opened my eyes to the genius in kids and the flawed design of our compulsory education system.
Admiral Farragut
John Taylor Gatto loved to tell stories about how capable young people are. He collected them.
One of his favorite stories to tell was about Admiral David Farragut, America's first Admiral. I used to tell this story by saying that Farragut was put on board a warship at age 13 as a midshipman, but had to correct myself after checking the facts. It turns out that he was put on board a warship at age 9.
This was not unusual for the time. The British Navy was like the British aristocracy: If you were born into it, you were expected to pick up the family traditions. Sending you off to a warship at a tender age to learn the trade was part of the drill. Farragut was fostered by a Navy family, and in fact served several times under his foster father, David Porter.
It was at age 11 that Farragut actually got his first brief command of a ship as a "prize master." His captain had taken a prize (captured a ship) and needed that ship to be sailed safely to a port. He gave Farragut that command. When the captured captain heard what was going to happen, he reputedly said, "I'm not going anywhere with an 11-year-old as captain." Farragut's reply was, "If he shows his face above decks, have him shot."
The rest, as they say, is history.
I'm pretty sure Gatto wasn't recommending we put all children into the military, or that we throw them into forced labor, but rather that young people are extraordinarily capable, a fact we not only seem to have forgotten, but are actively working against.
We've been quietly extending childhood, removing responsibility from young people with adolescence (a novel concept around 1904) and more recently early adulthood. C'mon now.
On schooling
The way Gatto won teaching prizes was by breaking many of the school's rules, though he wasn't saying that out loud. He would send his students to empty classrooms to work, unchaperoned. He had them in the streets of New York, selling local merchants ad space in the newspaper they were creating. He trusted them and held them to very high standards. They loved it.
When higher-ups started to send observers into his classrooms, he lost the the wiggle room to break those rules that obscurity gave him. Frustrated, he quit teaching and wrote this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal to describe why, then spent the rest of his life trying to convince everyone to trust children to be curious. It saddens me that that was his heresy.
From that op-ed, this description of his complicity in a broken system:
I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.
Gatto liked to note that it only takes about 50 contact hours for a child to learn basic reading or math. The only important variable is that they have to want to, and that doesn't happen in the same month of the same year of their lives, which is how schooling was often delivered.
A keen student of history, Gatto knew how the sausage that is the compulsory education system in America had been created. If you read Gatto's Underground History of American Education (wow! don't buy that one; read this one), you'll learn about The Hidden Curriculum of School.
Here's how I described Gatto's work at U22:
Next up: Contrarian Christopher Alexander.
As you'll see in this short series, Contrarians are masters of rethinking constraints. They are also the foundations of Design from Trust.
If you read this far, a treat: In my online Brain, you'll find all my Contrarians here, where you can see them in their greater context.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.