Winston-Salem played host to more than 8,500 North Carolina home schoolers in May who were attending the 19th annual North Carolinians for Home Education conference and book fair. The gathering sells out a dozen area hotels at least six months in advance and draws speakers with credentials from around North Carolina and the nation.

Retired teacher John Taylor Gatto was featured in three conference lectures. Gatto is a 26-year veteran of the New York City public school system. He received the New York City Teacher of the Year Award many times during his career, and in 1991 was named New York state teacher of the year. On July 25, 1991, while he was still teacher of the year, Gatto announced his decision to quit teaching in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

A teacher, but not an educator

In “I may be a teacher, but I’m not an educator,” Gatto’s Wall Street Journal statement said. “I’ve taught public school for 26 years, but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think,” he wrote.

Gatto’s long teaching career included “some of the worst, and also some of the best” New York city schools. He taught in Harlem and Spanish Harlem, as well as on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In The Curriculum of Necessity: What Must An Educated Person Know? Gatto wrote, “It took me about a decade to realize that schooling and education are concepts that are at war with each other.”

What would make an award-winning veteran like Gatto decide that the education system delivers too much “system” and too little education?

Teacher and author

Gatto is the author of Dumbing Us Down, The Guerrilla Curriculum: How to Get an Education in Spite of School, The Underground History of American Education, and other books on schooling and education.

The subject of Gatto’s first NCHE conference talk, “Discouraging Genius: the Paradox of Extended Childhood,” blends themes from his books. In Dumbing Us Down he wrote, “…I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”

Some of the “unlikeliest” kids he taught, according to Gatto, occasionally demonstrated true human excellence — insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, and originality.

But what Gatto experienced in the system of education didn’t fan those sparks. Instead, it routinely extinguished them.

“I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down.”

The paradox of extended childhood

Gatto has been retired from the teaching profession for 12 years. He has used that time to study schooling and education. The conclusions he draws both alarm and disturb him.

“The recent history of American schooling is a history of childishness, deliberately imposed,” his “Discouraging Genius” talk begins. Childishness and boredom allow schools to continue to function, he argues.

“Cellblock style confinement” in classrooms, an unhealthy fast-food diet, artificial isolation from everyone except their age group, and a collection of disjointed activities that pass as curriculum, “[plunge] children into the trancelike state which boredom produces.”

Instead of youthful energy and openness to new experiences, Gatto said, school children are “selfish, irresponsible, envious, inconsiderate, and whining.”

They are also bored. “Bored, bored all the time,” Gatto said. Why don’t schools encourage resilience, curiosity, and the traits that have traditionally meant success in Western society? Because these traits promote maturity, and maturity is inconsistent with the school system as we know it, he said.

Boredom and the school model

The American school system is based upon a 19th-century Prussian model designed to regiment and homogenize students as much as possible, Gatto and many other education scholars have argued.

The Prussian model was designed to produce a functional and submissive citizen. Independent thought would disrupt the system, and was systematically discouraged.

This meant separating children from the influences of family and church, and segregating them into groups that were similar in immaturity and age.

American schools have adopted the regimented, segregated approach to school modeled by the Prussians.

It is a system designed to eliminate youthfulness and create “trancelike boredom,” Gatto said.

“Children and their parents are told that ”if they show up and shut up, everything will be fine,” in the words of Virginia teacher Patrick Welsh.

Mind-numbing conditions, according to Gatto, create order and predictability in schools. They don’t lead to an education. Those were the conditions that hurt children, Gatto said.

In order to educate them, he would have to send them out of the schools.

Guerrilla education

Gatto’s frustration with the stifling conditions in schools led him to try guerrilla education instead. In Dumbing Us Down he tells the story of his Lab School program.

“For five years I ran a guerrilla program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service.”

The school was “in chaos,” and the program was allowed to run under Gatto’s supervision. It was cheap, and enormously successful. It was closed down as soon as “stability” returned, Gatto reports.

Guerrilla education means training children to be and think in ways that regular schools can’t tolerate.

“Getting outside the box isn’t hard,” Gatto said. “Think of it this way: Well-schooled people are trained to reflexively obey; train yours [children] to have independent judgement…” School leaves children no time for solitude, so they dread being alone.

Gatto has sent students off to apprenticeships, to jobs, and to go fishing, instructing them to leave the city and just spend time alone.

The opportunity for solitude lets them “learn to enjoy their own company. ” Compulsory-attendance laws promote the shallow inner life of a perpetually bored person, Gatto said.

Gatto identified many people who became well-educated in home schools. They include David Farragut, in charge of a warship in his teen years, George Washington, who taught himself geometry at age 11, and Francis Collins, the head of the human genome project. Collins studied almost no science before college. He learned how to think and how to learn in school at home.

Keeping the spark of genius from being smothered is a priority for Gatto.

“If that happened to you… it’s the most important thing in the world that you don’t let it happen to your kids,” he said.

Palasek is a policy analyst at the North Carolina Education Alliance and assistant editor of Carolina Journal.