John Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction Speech

John Gatto had a stroke several months ago that left him paralyzed on one side of his body. He doesn’t want any more flowers and cards, but he does want prayers and love sent his way. To encourage those healing feelings I asked John for permission to make public his speech, Weapons of Mass Instruction, that he delivered at my Learning In Our Own Way conference in 2005. He said “Yes!’ before I could finish my sentence.

For someone struggling with physical disability and all the woes that come with that, I was amazed at how clearly and strongly John spoke about what is happening in schools today. Though confined to bed, the strength of his thoughts overcame his rigid body and we spoke for nearly two hours. John is a fighter, as this speech will show you, and the fighting spirit he displayed to me in the nursing facility was inspiring, as I hope you find this talk to be, too.

The Moral Argument Against Compulsory Education

Cevin Soling is a guest columnist on Forbes magazine's education blog today, and his essay is timely and provocative. The title of the piece is "Santorum and Harvard Anarchist Agree: Public Schools Must Be Abolished." Cevin is the director of the movie The War on Kids, and he pulls no punches in his moral stance against forcing children to attend a place that denies them their civil rights.

Mr. Crotty's introduction to Cevin's piece explains the headline Crotty gave to the piece:

A homophobic, global-warming-denying, Intelligent Design-believing conservative calling public schools “factories”? Santorum’s semi-Marxist rant is proof of my adage that if you push hard enough in one ideological direction you end up in the other camp. In the above quote and in other recent instances, Santorum has unwittingly outlined a case for creative, customized, progressive education.

John Holt often observed that the way to move past the school reform impasse is to create mixed allies, and homeschooling was the movement he worked with to embody this idea. I think this is the reality that is embedded in the paradox above.

Further, while working with Holt's unpublished writing I came across sections of a discarded manuscript of his from the early seventies entitled, "Living Free Among the Slaves: A Handbook for the Young." I am working to piece it together and Cevin's article inspires me to move even faster on it!