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Weapons of Mass Instruction John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking.
Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable, remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the industrial economy and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state.
John Gatto shows us that Ivy League schools do not produce the most successful graduates, some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs are high school drop outs and Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie didn’t finish elementary school. An education matters desperately, but spending a fortune on college fees will not get you one.
Filled with examples of people who have escaped the trap of compulsory schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction shows us realization of personal potential is not possible within the system of compulsory schooling. That requires a different way of growing up and learning, one Gatto calls “open source learning.” In chapters such as “A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter”; “Fat Stanley”; and “Walkabout:London”, Gatto gives us a window into a different reality.
$24.95
2
The Underground History of American Education Gatto's opus. Buy a copy for a friend or your local library. ISBN 0-945-70004-0
We have the last lot of hardcover copies of A Different Kind of Teacher available. When you buy a copy of Underground History, you can purchase A Different Kind of Teacher for only $10.25. Regular price for the book by itself is $23. Our price with this sale is even cheaper than what the paperback version of A Different Kind of Teacher sells for on Amazon.com! And of course you'll still get our free audio tape, A Short Angry History of Modern Schooling and John's autographed label as well. Thanks for your support.
Yes! I want to take advantage of this special offer for a total of $45.20:
$34.95
3
Dumbing Us Down Written in the first months after John Taylor Gatto left schoolteaching, this book has attained the status of an underground classic, remaining in print, with 150,000 copies sold, for ten years. A hard-hitting reflection on the significance of schools and schoolteaching, the difference between networks and communities, and what lies at the heart of being congregationally American as opposed to corporatively American. New Society Publishers 106 pages, paperback USA ISBN 0-86571-448-7 $11.95
As of April 2002: The publisher has replaced the original edition with a 10th Anniversary Second Edition. The new version, in addition to a new cover; has a foreword by Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul); a new introduction by the book's original publisher, David Albert; and a completely new essay by John entitled, Afterward: Ten Years Later. The new book has about 20% more text than the first edition and the original version is now no longer in print.
The Exhausted School: The First National Grassroots Speakout On the Right to School Choice. In November of 1991, about a year after he had been named New York State Teacher of the Year by the New York State Education Department, John Taylor Gatto organized an evening speakout at Carnegie Hall in New York City, denouncing the monopoly status of government schools. Clad in white tie and tails, Gatto invited four of his former students, spanning a quarter century of his teaching career, to reminisce on what really mattered in their own educations, and four directors of alternative forms of educational practice to elaborate on what it was they did that was different. This is the record of that performance together with Gatto's observations, and instructions to the various speakers made a week before the show. Oxford Village Press/The Odysseus Group 120 pages, paperback ISBN 0-945700-02-4
$10.95
5
A Different Kind of Teacher This book of short essays, written in the years following John's resignation from teaching, is a companion piece to Dumbing Us Down. Like the earlier book, it shows the development of a schoolteacher's thought after time for reflection made thinking possible. Covers some of the same issues, such as the title essay - which ruminates on the human quality in worthwhile teaching. ISBN 1-893163-21-0
Audio Cassettes and Compact Discs appx one hour each **Note** All Compact Discs have been digitally remastered.
$8 cassette
$9.95 CD
1
What Is An Education? An examination of Three Ideas About the Business of Learning, Schooling and Education. Gatto reflects on his own curriculum and definition of an educated person.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
2
Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up! Gatto's Keynote address at the 20th Anniversary Conference of Growing Without Schooling. A discussion of humiliation. The dramatic environment of class-based schooling, and the common need to take action against the structure of forced schooling.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
3
On The Scientific Management of Children: A Short Angry History. Tracks the rise of 4th Purpose in schooling which supplanted the traditional purposes to make good people, good citizens, and good lives.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
4
The Congregational Principle Locates the essential core of a free society in a fundamental principle brought to America by British Dissenters and Independents, and shows how this is subverted by schooling.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
5
A Schooling Is Not An Education An hour-long conversation between Barbara Dunlop of Pacifica Radio and John Taylor Gatto just after he left schoolteaching.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
6
The Logical Tragedy of Benson, Vermont The true tale of a tiny community driven to the verge of bankruptcy by the growth and articulation of systematic schooling. Why a school district with only 130 students "requires" a Superintendent and an Assistant Superintendent, and all the rest.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
7
Mudsill Theory - Jamie Escalante and the Lancaster Amish An attempt to ground modern schooling in a negative theory of human nature, and the British class-based social ideal, and to refute the theory with current examples.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
8
The Neglected Genius of American Spirituality Given at the Conference on Spirituality in Boulder, Colorado at which the Dalai Lama delivered the keynote. A profound analysis of pedagogy inherent to Western religion and the modern attempt to deliver its equivalent through forced schooling, an attempt which has failed.
Cassette:
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9
Beyond Money An analysis of how money devalues services which were once done charitably, how grades devalue independent learning, and why the things that matter will always be beyond money.
Cassette:
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10
The Seven-lesson Schoolteacher The second school analysis John ever produced and now a legend in the underground a decade later. Examines the "hidden curriculum" which requires schooling to be compulsory.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
11
The Guerrilla Curriculum Recorded live in a Gatto workshop. Some of the things he did with kids that worked.
(This selection is two tapes.)
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
$16.00
cassette
$18.90
CD
12
The Paradox of Extended Childhood From a presentation in Cambridge, Mass. October 2000. In this tape Gatto talks about our society's need for a population that is kept in a virtual state of perpetual childishness.
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
13
Beyond Columbine From a talk given at Barnes & Noble. NYC, January 2001. Gatto takes a look at the fundamental causes of the Columbine massacre. He goes beyond the media critique which blames the event on everything but the nature of schooling.
(This selection is two tapes.)
Cassette:
Compact Disc:
$16.00
cassette
$18.90
CD
Videotapes
$24.95
each
1
Classrooms of the Heart Filmed by the Christian Science Monitor in John Gatto's last New York City classroom, shown a number of times on the Discovery Channel.
2
Absolute Absolution Filmed at the yearly meeting of the Utah Home Education Association. Covers some of the same ground contained in the cassette #8 above, but delves much more deeply into the plan substituting science for religion in American Schools.
3
The Logical Tragedy of Benson, Vermont This presentation by John Gatto was the high point of the first Washington, D.C. conference of the Separation of School and State Alliance. Gatto explores how citizens of a little town in Vermont struggled to free themselves from the choking embrace of institutional schooling.
