The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto (1991) | Hacker News Reader

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto (1991)

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47 pointswalterbell20 comments

Haven’t we learned by now that the “I have the secret of X that only I can tell you” is almost always bullshit.

Yes, ideally a kid will learn basic stuff in 50 hours. What happens when he doesn’t?

My son is a super smart kid, way smarter than I am. But he struggled to read at first... his teacher helped him immensely with different strategies to get him on the reading train. Now, we can’t get him to put books down.

The Gatto stuff is appealing but relies on a false assumptions. There was never a time when we were all yeoman farmers reading great literature on our own or in self organized study groups. There was never a time where every kid had the family life they deserved, with enough food, present parents, nobody struggling with drugs or alcohol, etc.

Gatto has good points, but frames them in fantastical bullshit.

Gatto's book Dumbing Us Down expands on the ideas of this essay and argues his side quite effectively. His ideas are based on his multiple decades as a successful schoolteacher and are well-supported by history. You don't have to agree with them, but you seem to be dismissing them too quickly and casually.

For example, here's a quote from Dumbing Us Down that I found persuasive:

"We had school, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, twenty percent of whom were slaves, and fifty percent indentured servants."

From the little I've read on the topic, there are many good reasons to be skeptical of the 600,000 copy figure cited here.

This [0] article summarizes some of the debate.

At a high level, the number seems to be derived from Thomas Paine's assertions that he sold 120,000 copies in the first three months of Common Sense's release. However, Paine had no way to measure this number and likely didn't even have a way to reasonably estimate it.

The article mentions a historian that analyzed data from the time (number of known printings and maximum batch size for a print run): "Putting all this together–twenty-five printings at a maximum of 3,000 each (even though most print runs were probably much less), Loughran places the far upper limit at 75,000, but she thinks the true number was much less than that."

I don't know much about Gatto or Dumbing Us Down. However, I personally don't find this quote persuasive, given the uncertainty around the 600k figure.

[0] https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/03/thomas-paines-inflated-...

Saying his ideas are well-supported by history is a bit generous considering his historical arguments always seem to boil down to a barrage of anecdotal evidence of dubious factual value. To be fair, I've only read the Underground History and not Dumbing us Down, but here's a quote from wikipedia:

"The publicity generated by the initial success and compounded by the publishing disagreements propelled the pamphlet to incredible sales and circulation. Following Paine's own estimate of the pamphlet's sales, some historians claim that Common Sense sold almost 100,000 copies in 1776,[13] and according to Paine, 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months. One biographer estimates that 500,000 copies sold in the first year (in both America and Europe, predominantly France and Britain), and another writes that Paine's pamphlet went through 25 published editions in the first year alone.[7][14] However, some historians dispute these figures as implausible because of the literate population at the time and estimated the far upper limit as 75,000 copies."

Now, this gets into a bit of a weird circular argument where the book didn't sell as many copies because the people weren't literate and therefore the people weren't literate because the book didn't sell so many copies. Still, claiming that the book sold 600,000 copies seems disingenuous unless Gatto expanded upon it. I don't remember him citing his sources either in his book, but it's not like I've looked at the sources either, so whatever.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the 600000 copies is accurate, the next question then becomes how many other books was it competing against? I mean if there was just this book and the bible for sale, that might explain it (obviously there was more competition, but not quite as much as there is today)

After that is answered we should probably also note that Paine was a celebrity of sorts at the time.

Do we have to put the kids that learn all of elementary school in 50 hours through the exact same process we put the ones that can't through?

Homeschool.

To me, it reads like a manifesto of seemingly self evident but non-falsifiable and non-actionable assertions. It's basically a framing of reality intended to provoke outrage.

For each of the 6 conditions, what happened when you removed it?

Read “Bootie Zimmer’s Choice”. Also, this doesn’t sound like something that happens in typical classroom teaching.

Thanks for sharing. Here's a horror: No Child Left Behind and it's progeny, Common Core, have maximized standardization of the curriculum component, starving teachers and institutions of funding and flexibility of time to offer any form of education for students who would benefit from it.

Gatto is right--our system is a machine. And it produces quite a bit of literacy at low cost to the people who need it. It also fails to solve problems that it could.

Terry Pratchett had "lies to children" -useful short circuits against the truth to get a pedagogical goal, like "triangles add up to 180" (not true on a curved or complex surface)

Robert M. Pirsig would have been in the same head-space as this author.

It's called "plane geometry" for a reason. You don't have to preface every proof for the entire semester with "now this only is true on a flat surface..."

don't have to preface every proof with it, but stating it at least once would be helpful

John Taylor Gatto: The Underground History of American Education

https://schoolsucksproject.com/john-taylor-gatto/

>I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.

'Classroom' does have 'class' at its root.

My father went to one of the last of the one-room schools, in eastern Washington state. He said about a quarter of the class would be listening to lessons at any time, the rest doing assignments or, if they had finished, a project chosen from the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia geared for that, that all such schools had; or, helping younger kids with their work.

The faster younger kids sat in lessons with the slower older ones. They all overheard lessons taught to older kids before they got there themselves.

Separating kids by age is historically new, harmful, and weird. Traditionally, younger learned from older, who learned better by needing to teach. The experience of teaching might be our greatest loss.

Right, because students were historically separated into groups by ... age?

...and zip code, which is very correlated with parental income, occupation, and education level

On the contrary, I would contend that there is real knowledge being taught in schools.

But I do concede that it is being taught in suboptimal ways. School is draining and somehow unfun and that makes it difficult to learn.

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