The first Chapter of Dumbing Us Down is a speech given by John Taylor Gatto when he was named New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.
The following list contains short quotes from each section, but you can find the full speech below.
“These are the things I teach; these are the things you pay me to teach.”
Confusion
“Everything I teach is out of context. . .Even in the best schools, a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, a host of internal contradictions.”
Class Position
“I teach that students 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’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes.”
Indifference
“I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do.”
Emotional Dependency
“By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. . . Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.”
Intellectual Dependency
“Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. . .Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for. Actually, though, this is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs—why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.”
Provisional Self-Esteem
“…I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. . .the cumulative weight of these objective-seeming documents establishes a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decisions about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor.” (emphasis added)
One Can’t Hide
“I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by me and my colleagues. . . children must be closely watched if you want to keep society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.”
I encourage you to buy the book. If you reach out to me, I occasionally buy it for others.