Hello Mr Taylor Gatto and all here

I wanted to say how inspiring I found your interview on RIR the other day. Thank you so much for having the courage to speak out.

As a former student, then teacher, senior education executive and director, I am in complete agreement with your estimation of the purposes, quality and value of education, at least in the western world today.

Creativity and critical thinking are patently the least valued skills/talents in our public schools - and yet the most needed today. I mean creativity in the sense of authentically thinking outside the box that the cliched outside-the-box is in. Creativity is not just about being able to build flashy websites and think up snappy soundbites. But that's what the curriculum has reduced it to, it appears to me.

And I don't mean critical thinking in the now often pejorative sense of cynically demolishing the propositions and arguments of those you want to get out of your way, dismiss, control, manipulate and/or bully. I mean the ability to think independently, searching out and using all the available evidence whether you agree with it or not, making incisive connections and comparisons with ostensibly quite disparate fields of knowledge, weighing it all judiciously, and rationally (and compassionately) reaching your own assessments that are independent of any needs you may have to toe the line or fit in with whatever restrictive social norms that various groups, fighting for your allegiance, are attempting to inflict on you - whilst remembering that all conclusions are always open to change as more evidence and knowledge become available..

To pick up another thread of Mr Taylor Gatto's observations, I'm an amateur family historian with a great deal of Scottish ancestry. Readers may know that Scotland (not England) has a long history of fine education and of holding teaching and learning in the highest esteem.

Recently, I discovered an ancestor who was born during the despicable Highland Clearances, which were not just an ethnic cleansing but rather a species extermination. This man became a teacher in the days when schooling was voluntary, had to be paid for out of the pittances Highlanders worked very hard for, and before it was imposed by statute and then free to all. That is, we're talking about the late 1700s.

I discovered that my ancestor was teaching Highland crofters' children advanced mathematics, English and Gaelic literature (remember that English was a second language), Newtonian physics, Latin and Greek, using texts from such as Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Cicero and so on. Crofters' children whose destinies were most often to milk the one or two cows (if they were lucky), work the patch of ground to grow the family's oats and 'neeps, who tended the half a dozen sheep....

My ancestor was the progenitor of an unbroken line of at least 7 generations of teachers and, along with other Scottish schoolmasters of his ilk, the inspiration for countless children. Yet Highland life must have been quite tough for him and his family too. They were also dependent on their neighbours' agricultural success or otherwise he simply would not get paid.

Here's something I found very telling. In the second half of his life he lived in the only Highland village - a tiny flyspeck of a place with probably fewer than 100 residents - that successfully resisted the Sheriffs, Bailiffs and soldiers who came to raze their wee butts and bens and to oust the villagers in favour of sheep. In this village, my ancestor had created a thriving school, the villagers were educated, they could not only read and write and do sums but they also had a very good grounding in science, philosophy and critical thinking. No doubt they kept up with the wider affairs of their day. As I read about all this, I found myself wondering how much the education they had received actually encouraged and empowered them to resist the sadly often murderous and always bullyboy tactics of inhumane and dictatorial absentee landlords with such righteous indignation?

Where is the inspirational leadership of teachers today? How many children learn philosophy at age 9! How many children learn to read, write and speak Latin and Greek? How many children are encouraged to explore the world through the often irreverent and iconoclastic literary works of any but a few carefully chosen, fossilised 'usual suspects' imposed by state-sanctioned national curricula? How many 10 year olds could tell you who Socrates or Ovid or Juvenal or Newton or Galileo were? In other words, how many children nowadays leave school actually equipped for the challenges of the world as it really is?

I believe that we are indeed, as Mr Taylor Gatto argues, beset and diminished by too much educare, whilst some of us bitterly lament the suppression of educere. http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/EJ724880.pdf

10/10 Mr Taylor Gatto! Keep on fighting the good fight and lighting lamps of wisdom.

Craig,
I've been in this forum for several years but I sense that it has been around far longer.
That was just my set-up to tell you that your post was by far the best post on this forum during my tenure. At this time it would not be unexpected if I said, "I couldn't agree with you more." But that implies I am thinking the same thoughts as you. That is not true. You have taken the direction of my thinking and gone far beyond me. Thanks for the Pole Star.
I do have to ask, have you read about the Trivium?
Ron

Red Ice Creations

Thank you for pointing this out, Craig. Another great interview(s)!

Also very interesting was your discovery of your ancestor-teacher. I am wondering, since you mentioned your career in education, what your profession is now. The story you relate about your ancestor reminds me of the great classicist Gilbert Highet, who emigrated to the States and became a faculty member at Columbia University. Some of his books include the Classical Tradition, on Greek and Roman influence on Western literature, the Art of Teaching and Man's Unconquerable Mind. I thought you might be interested in his work. From Wikipedia:

Like others teaching at Columbia at this time – Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Eric Bentley, Ernest Nagel – Gilbert Highet conceived of his work as the fostering of a tradition. "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but 'minds' alive on the shelves," Highet wrote. He believed that "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."

As a scholar in an era in which democracy, communism, and fascism vied for supremacy, he believed it was the duty of the intellectual to support freedom and defend pluralism. "The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same," he wrote. "They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people."

Thanks again for coming to the forum to actually speak on the topic of education and its importance to critical thinking and independence.

Thank you very much.
Ron

You're welcome!

I took off my goat costume and changed back into my angel suit for you.