As a teacher John Taylor Gatto helped many kids find and reach potentials they never imagined. As an educator he helped many adults understand the abuses of the public school system. In his 1991 article, I Quit, I Think, Gatto laid out the worst of the school system. After 26 years he'd had enough.
I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.
I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren’t meant to participate in our form of schooling, rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.
But beyond the affect the public indoctrination system has on children and families it also teaches parents to have a high degree of dependence on the government. After decades of public schooling it is believed that these failing institutions are the primary care-givers and most effective educators for children. If the state servants dictate your child must be medicated, then who are you to argue? After all, they are the trusted authority that spends more time with your children than you do. If they teach your child to hate themselves because of their skin color, then you best just accept it. If they decide your kid must piss their pants and obey the designated times to go to the bathroom, then your kid will sit there in piss being bullied by the other kids.
Parents have forfeited their rights, relationships, and duties to the convenience of the state. This has led to generational degeneracy and irresponsibility. If a child grows to be a shitty bigoted racist homophobic misogynist then it is not the fault of the parents. It is the fault of society, and it is their peers that are required to take responsibility for correcting the behavior and policing the sinner.
As this system has progressed it has introduced more extreme ideas onto the children wrapped in carefully packaged euphemisms to placate the parental authorities that may dare question the motives. If, like myself, you were a teen in the 90's you probably remember the invent of the term participation trophies. For our generation this was an oddity. We were lucky enough to gave been raised during a period of competition. We would try, fail, get upset, then get better. We tasted loss over and over, hated the taste, and worked hard. But soon after we came of age those losers of our generation decided that since they had hated losing and hard work equally they would create systems which allowed no losers to exist. Enter the equity generation.
For decades children have been convinced showing up is enough to be entitled to praise and reward. Some parents recognized immediately the potential hazards this emotionally driven ideal presented for the development of young minds, but enough parents enjoyed the inclusivity and coziness such disatrous precedents presented. Outcomes and successes were no longer to be celebrated, and if you achieved anything of significance it didn't make you a winner; it made you a predator that left victims in your wake.
Almost simultaneously the advent of the internet and 21st century technology was taking hold, and young adults were inventing systems of world-wide instant gratification. Mail communications, board games, and social interactions were being digitized at a frantic rate.
Then 9/11 happened, and the participation trophy generation was told that the entire world was a potential threat. Risk adverse behavior became the new normal. The days of hitchhiking across the country and hospitality to strangers was considered dangerous. Kids were expected to remain in their homes if they were unsupervised. Fights on the playground and schoolyard bullies were a thing of the past. Children were to be insulated from risk and want, always feeling secure and entitled, or the parents were neglectful and abusive.
Today this generation of overly insulated entitled state raised humanoids are adults (in appearance only). They remain loyal to state propaganda, have experienced no freedom or rebellion, suffer little to no consequences, and insist the maternal state provide their every desire. Hard work is considered a racist ideal. Bootstraps are a fashion accessory. Paychecks are a government program. And no cathedral is more revered than the press. Having graduated high school, been indoctrinated in college, and escaped into civility they demand their safe spaces extend out into your life.
Is it any wonder why COVID hysteria has reached such a fever pitch? The children that have never been allowed to fail, that have been bubblewrapped and kept from experiencing the world, that have been told equity is the highest of virtues next to democracy are finding out that people die, hearts ache, stomachs yearn, work is hard, life is harder, and dangers exist. These underdeveloped brains that have been coddled into adulthood are experiencing the greatest of pains. Their entire lives have been a lie - a carefully constructed narrative meant to keep them subservient to the very unpleasant people that are in power and the institutions they represent.