The Resignation of John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto was the New York teacher of the year from 1989 to 1991, who quit his job with an article in the Wall Street Journal when he decided that enough was enough with how the school system is not truly conducive to truly learning. He then dedicated his life to exposing the fallacies of modern schooling, its obscured history, and alternatives. For a nice, long introduction to what he has to say, check out his freely available book, The Underground History of American Education (thanks for the link, First Dark!). He's also working on a film documentary.

The following is the first paragraph of his resignation:

In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century during my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district, crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while I was on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating handbook published by the Student Council gave me the highest ratings in the department my last three years), after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fund-raiser in New York City history, after placing a single eighth-grade class into 30,000 hours of volunteer community service, after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, after securing over a thousand apprenticeships, directing the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries, after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, and launching an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students within a larger human reality, I quit.

Read on...

Back in high school, after discovering John Taylor Gatto, I became inspired to try and pull something off as a graduation stunt. I wrote a short speech about how broken everything is with schooling, had a female friend who didn't go to my school record a speech I wrote in order to throw off the authorities, and came pretty close to broadcasting it on my school's intercom with nothing but a discman, some broken headphones and some tape. The intercom was (And reportedly still is) accessible by pressing 3 buttons from any phone in the school hooked up to the private branch exchange - 5, *, and 1. This was something I discovered through the ancient and lost art of phone phreak "handscanning" (Dialing huge ranges of numbers and seeing what comes up), which passed the time in photography class while waiting for stuff to develop. Most things that are fun like that are things they'll never teach you in school. Unfortunately, I brought in too many camera people from outside the school, and things got heated out before the speech could be played. The principal and vice-principal let me off with a warning after they saw my speech, though, which maybe really meant something. Later, I ended up telling a couple of other kids how to get on the intercom, and then on the last day I ever had of high school, I went on to say "Ignorance is bliss until the informed take advantage of the ignorant". The kids I told just said "GRAD '07, WOO", and we didn't get in a lick of trouble again because we were finally done with those 13 years of hell, anyways.

It would have been cool if I still had that speech, but it was a bit immature and badly written to the best of my memory, so no huge loss. What I do have, though, is something I thought I had lost on my stolen cell phone but recently rediscovered a crusty old backup of: A video of my high school's staff room and its liquor cabinet!

Tue, Mar 3, 2009  Permanent link

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