Laments about our schools are nothing new; everyone is an expert, it seems, when it comes to education. While most critics point to the lack of funding or the shortage of teachers, John Taylor Gatto insists the problem goes deeper; we’ve turned our schools, he says, into “torture chambers.”
If that sounds abrasively radical, consider this: John Gatto, with almost thirty years’ experience as a public-school teacher, has just been named New York City’s Teacher of the Year for 1989.
Gatto teaches seventh grade at Junior High School 54 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Something of a local legend, he’s a chess player and a songwriter — and he grows garlic. He was once named Citizen of the Week for coming to the aid of a woman who had been robbed. He has lectured on James Joyce’s Ulysses at Cornell University and has taught philosophy at California State College. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s been approached by a film company interested in making a movie of his life.
