Excerpts from John Taylor Gatto - The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher

The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.
He was named New York City Teacher of the year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

"Look...at the seven lessons of school teaching --
1. CONFUSION
2. CLASS POSITION
3. INDIFFERENCE
4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY
5. INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY
6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM
7. ONE CAN'T HIDE
all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over this time the training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s, the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle class as well. "

READ: THE SEVEN LESSON SCHOOLTEACHER

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