In the early nineties John Taylor Gatto resigned from 26 years of award-winning teaching in Manhattan's public schools. He, similarly, had come to recognize that his job as teacher was best accomplished not by trying to fill children's heads with his supposed expertise, but rather by removing obstacles to the emergence of each child's innate, unique potential. He had used his classes as a laboratory where he could develop a fuller appreciation of what human possibility is; what releases and what inhibits human power. He came to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality; and that he had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it. He saw that, regardless of what he thought he was doing as a teacher, most of what he was actually doing was teaching an "invisible curriculum that reinforced the myths of the school institution and those of an economy based on caste." He began to devise "guerrilla exercises" to allow his students to be their own teachers and to make themselves the major text of their own education.

In 1991 Gatto was named the New York State Teacher of the Year. The intent of the speech he made on this occasion was to convey his belief that while teaching means different things in different places, seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. Here, maintaining his voice, I summarize his points.

1. Confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating and disconnections of everything. I teach too much: from the orbiting of planets to adjectives. Curricula are full of internal contradictions and lack coherence. Kids leave school without one genuine enthusiasm or in-depth appreciation of anything. Human beings seek meaning, not disconnected facts.

In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work, or because of too many moves or job changes or too much ambition... I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny.

2. Class position. I teach students they must stay in the class where they belong. If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I have shown them how to envy and fear the better classes, and have contempt for the dumb classes. The lesson is everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and you must stay where you are put.

3. Indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. I do this by demanding students become totally involved in my lessons, exhibit enthusiasm for my teaching, compete with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever they've been doing and proceed to the next class.

Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything.

4. Emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Individuality is a contradiction to class theory and curse to all systems of classification.

5. Intellectual dependency. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. They learn that we must wait for others, better trained, to make the choices that will direct our lives. Successful children do the thinking I assign with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Curiosity has no place, only conformity. Bad kids fight this, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting. There are procedures to break the will of those who resist. Our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren't trained to be dependent. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do.

6. Provisional self-esteem. It is impossible to make self-confident spirits conform. (Not so true today, with Ritalin and other drugs —ed.) Our world wouldn't survive a flood such spirits, so I teach that a child's self respect should depend on expert opinion. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but rely on the evaluation of certified officials.

7. One can't hide. I teach children they are always under constant surveillance. There are no private spaces for children, no private times. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other. The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, privacy is not legitimate. Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.

Television rivals, even surpasses, schools in controlling our children's lives. In the past, childhood and adolescence were filled with real work, real charity, real adventures, community pursuits, and the search for mentors to teach them what they wanted to learn. Given the hours most children spend in school and before the TV, they are left with about eleven hours a week out of which to "create a unique consciousness." If rich children watch less TV, their time tends to be as controlled by commercial entertainments and private lessons.

Gatto's conclusions run parallel to Holt's. He concurs that what is currently under discussion about failing academic performance misses the point that the schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid, even though such a mandate is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. Mass education cannot support democracy nor the nonmaterial values that give meaning to life because its daily practice is rooted in competition, suppression, and intimidation. While thousands of humane, caring people work in the schools, the "logic" of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Good curricula, equipment, or teachers are not the critical determinants of a child's education. The method of mass-schooling is its only real content.

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