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Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling | 
| Author: John Taylor Gatto
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $7.34
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Rating:  124 reviews
Sales Rank: 8665
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6 x 0.5
ISBN: 0865714487
Dewey Decimal Number: 370
EAN: 9780865714489
ASIN: 0865714487
Publication Date: February 1, 2002
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
This radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine. In celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Dumbing Us Down and to keep this classic current, we are renewing the cover art, adding new material about John and the impact of the book, and a new Foreword.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 119 more reviews...
 Incredibly Insightful! December 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I highly recommend this book, whether you're interested in the education debate or not! After 30 years as a New York public schoolteacher, Gatto has incredible insights into our culture's obsession with consumerism, production and efficiency, the breakdown of the family, how "networking" has miserably failed to meet the need for true community, and the kind of culture our method of schooling produces.
Until we change our definition of "education" and leave the public school monopoly in the failed archives of history where it belongs, we will continue to see more of the same, as Gatto describes:
"Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction."
Pre-set education results in collective stupidity November 15, 2008
It's about a time to reconsider what education is. For mass schooling damages students. We would actually need less school, not more!
The truth is that schools only teach us how to follow orders. Of the millions of things of value to study, always somebody else decides what few you need to study - and how. They make us intellectually dependent animals! Like a good student always has to wait for a teacher to tell him what to do, a model citizen should also rely on other people to do the real thinking for him.
The "specialists", who are supposedly much better trained than ourselves, must take over in everything. In politics, religion, healthcare - you name it! They always know best. But, how come everything in our society tends to SUCK so well? -You figure it out...
 Catholic and private schools worse! November 15, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
But private schools, esp. Catholic schools are even worse. The students are dullards and conformist. The only real creative learning occurs in public schools, because the teachers are the best and the children nice, not spoiled brats. If you want unthinking conformity, try Catholic school.
A MUST READ FOR EVERY PARENT!! Scary, bone-chilling truths are revealed! November 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was glued to it from page 1. Actually, that's not true. I started long before page 1. You must read this book in it's entirety. Do not skip past the forwards or the "about the author" section! The whole thing was Fabulous. You really learn the truth about public schooling and it's agendas.
Thank you so much John Gatto!
A great opening argument in the case against government schooling September 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is basically a collection of speeches and essays by anti-gov't school advocate John Taylor Gatto, who is himself a longtime veteran of teaching -- he even won some "Teacher of the Year" awards -- in New York City public schools. Here, he looks at what our school system REALLY teaches, and what's wrong with those teachings.
While short, this book is compulsively readable and sketches many of the arguments found fleshed out in Mr. Gatto's longer works (such as THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION) as well as works by other critics of "public education" who are of the libertarian, anarchist, individualist, or paleoconservative mindset (or combinations thereof.) Mr. Gatto is of the opinion that compulsory government schools can't be "fixed" because they're actually accomplishing their real (as opposed to their stated) purpose perfectly. That is, they're turning out, in factory-like fashion, incomplete, soul-less, dependent, ignorant people who are better suited to being cogs in a machine or bees in a hive than they are to being good, self-sufficient citizens of a free republic. These mass people are educated just enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, but not enough to think critically about their situation, question authority, or take care of themselves (serving the interests of big government and big business which actually, contrary to popular belief, dovetail more often than not.)
Read this book with an open mind. It will probably go against your conscious conceptions, but it will also articulate many of the murky misgivings you've felt if you have attended and/or worked at government schools. It may even make you decide to keep your child from becoming one of the victims of the Leviathan schools. Heck, if enough Americans read this book (and others like it that dare to tell unpopular truths), maybe we could actually slay this particular Leviathan. One can hope.
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