Correspondence
John Taylor Gatto is always provocative and insightful, yet, as a teacher, I feel called upon to defend the work of myself and many of my colleagues from his broadsides against the public-school system. Yes, public schools are flawed, they encourage too much comparison and competition, and they do not reach a significant minority of students. However, Gatto says nothing about the dedicated people who spend many hours of their lives coaching academics, the arts, or athletics before and after school. These people provide human contact that can transcend the bureaucratic system. Nor does he mention the role of schools as a focal point in many communities. And, yes, some learning does take place in these all-too-imperfect places.
For such a progressive individual as Gatto to be celebrating charter schools and voucher schools seems ironic. Charter schools and the like result in separation and gross inequality; they siphon resources from the only system dedicated to educating all students. The destruction of public education, which appears to be Gatto’s goal, will further impoverish those without supportive families or those who lack the wherewithal to start their own programs. Gatto’s often trenchant criticisms sometimes cut too broadly; a little moderation would be welcome.
Although I am not a schoolteacher, John Taylor Gatto’s essay “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” [September 1995] affirmed many of my own ideas and experiences. The exchange in your November Correspondence section prompted me to read it again, however, and I noticed a disturbing point I had overlooked before: namely, when Gatto spoke of “this lesson I’m trying to teach you — or rather that Buddha is trying to teach us both.”
There are always problems when someone tries to teach unknown others in a forum like the essay. It implies that the author knows more and therefore has the authority to teach. It is better for a writer to simply share the wonder of what he or she has learned, and let others decide for themselves whether it has value for their lives.
Ken Powers
Portland, Tennessee
I read the article by John Taylor Gatto and the following interview with a combination of chagrin and delight. America’s wilderness gave Europeans the freedom to contemplate. But the overpopulation that sent our forebears west is closing in around us again. It is a luxury for Gatto to be able to escape to the wilds of upstate New York, a luxury that undermines his educational philosophy. Isn’t it fatuous to rigorously pursue conventional education and gain the rewards it promises, then tell students that conventional education is a crock? To champion Buddhist simplicity while holding on to the perks that provide the peace?
It has always disturbed me that Buddha was fat. It is so much easier to spend long days and years in contemplation when you are a rich prince. As some guru once said, “The perfect disciple is one who can always find a chicken.”
I love Gatto’s concept that the object of education is to help each individual realize his or her greatest personal potential. Since there is no standard future for any kid, there is no point in enforcing a standard education. But the Gattos of this world are rare, and if you clone them the Establishment will get wise and close the empty rooms of freedom.
In the twenty-first century, most people will live unremittingly urban lives. How do you give them the freedom of a weedy field or an old barn while they stand on the corner of 110th and Amsterdam? Will we burn down the cities in order to plant trees? Will the homeless get wise and go in search of abandoned barns? What new tools can we create to help teachers know what a child truly desires to learn, and how can we show children that they are free to learn as much as they wish?
Christopher King
Sherborn, Massachusetts
John Taylor Gatto responds:
Part of the problem surely resides in the title The Sun chose, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” It drips with cheap irony. The original title, “Private Solutions, Family Solutions,” was no prize, but at least it crudely indicated one message of the piece: that within modest resources and collective family wisdom (in this case, my wife’s) are the tools to deal with any difficulty. It is a matter of determining what really matters, independent of income and status.
The Buddha quote seemed apt, so I used it, but Buddha and summer vacations were not the point of my essay. The central idea was that we must question reflexive exchanges of time for money and the use of time to impose synthetic order on natural events. My attack is on conditioned, automatic thinking, not on people who farm the land. What is most often lost in reflexive thinking is the purpose of doing things; we’ve just about ruined this planet and all its societies with the belief (1) that the poor are different and must be contained, and (2) that the devil finds work for idle hands.
It is no accident that modern Western society despises private time, unimproved property, unschooled kids, and unregulated anything. The modern religion since Francis Bacon has been machinery and systems. Heirs to this tradition — businessmen, academics, professionals, engineers, and schoolmen among them — are creeping around everywhere “improving” things until we are choked by their dubious sacraments.
I’m intrigued by the difference between the Buddha I encountered and Evans’s farmer Buddha, who puts in a full day’s work at home and Grange; intrigued also with King’s rich-fatso Buddha, dispatching his faithful to beg a chicken. Janet and I were married in a Buddhist temple in 1961 solely because Buddhists charged nothing, while Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all wanted a minimum of twenty-five dollars; at the time I had no job and only ten dollars in my pocket. But I claim no more knowledge about Buddha than Evans and King. I was struck, however, by how banal the divinities they proffer are; being a well-fed guru or a conventional good citizen are not proper responses to the grotesque, mutilated environment of, say, New York City.
To King I say that all the tools we need to help each other already exist — no new ones are necessary. Our failure is in perceiving what really matters, not in curricula or distribution of goods.
Finally, I thank Klonsky for his compliments, but he has radically mischaracterized me as “a progressive individual.” My essay should have warned him I am thoroughly antiprogressive. Progress is possible only in the individual’s struggle within him- or herself, not through government nostrums like schooling. Public education is not the enemy, but government-compelled schooling is: the compulsion is indefensible. Abandon compulsion and nothing the government does will go uncorrected for long. In my experience, the best schoolteachers are determined saboteurs. I hope Klonsky is one of them.
I enjoyed the responses, in your November Correspondence section, to John Taylor Gatto’s essay “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” [September 1995]. For me, as a teacher, Gatto’s radical views always prompt much thinking — and self-critique. I certainly agree with his identification of the basic educational problems. Over the years, Gatto’s essays have allowed me to understand why the system is what it is. I never felt comfortable with his solution of sabotaging the system. Yet, undeniably, his results were strong.
Then I saw it: Gatto is successful not because his students throw bottles into the ocean, or because they figure out how to win contests, or because he knows the history of American education. Gatto is successful because he loves his students in very real and tangible ways. He doesn’t separate his life from their lives. I realized this just in time to have a very special semester of teaching.
John Small
Lincoln, Vermont
John Taylor Gatto’s “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” [September 1995] reads like a more-Buddha-than-thou lecture. Would Buddha attend two Ivy League colleges so he could make big bucks, live in a three-bathroom house on the Upper West Side, and travel to the country on weekends and in the summer while having someone else cut his hay for money and add a room to his barn in exchange for land — all so that he could do nothing? I think not. Buddha would be living on the land, cutting his own hay, raising corn, and attending the monthly meetings at the Grange. Buddha doesn’t take summer vacations.
David E. Evans
Portland, Oregon
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