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American Education History Tour |
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John Taylor Gatto, author of "The Underground History of American Education," has composed this graphic representation of the real history of the education establishment in America. |
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Government Schooling Comes to America: The Origins of Government Schooling in the United States |
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Matthew Brouillette |
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The first step in understanding the state of education today is to review how government came to be the dominant force behind schooling in the United States. From the outset of the first settlements in the New World, Americans founded and successfully maintained a decentralized network of schools through the 1850s. Then, beginning in New England, a wave of change swept across the country, which soon saw states quickly abandoning the original American model of decentralized, private education in favor of government-funded and operated schools.
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How Home Schooling Will Change Public Education |
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Paul T. Hill |
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More than 1.2 million students are now being taught at home, more students than are enrolled in the entire New York City public school system. Paul T. Hill reports on the pros and cons of learning at home—and the effects home schooling will have on public schools.
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State Education Fails The Test |
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William Trench |
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Children naturally love to learn. They want to know everything. "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" "Why can't I see my back?" "Why are those dogs doing that?" "Are we there yet?" And so on and so on. Then we send them to school. And all desire to learn is methodically destroyed. Many of today's citizens are products of the schools of the last twenty years, during which time the trend has been to adopt a more and more socialistic posture. Most teachers have never spent their lives anywhere except in classrooms, and their vision of the world is so much at odds with the real world of business and industry as to be virtually a different society.
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Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech |
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John Taylor Gatto |
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This is the text of a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990. From the speech: "Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents...we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum--time to return to it...Time for a return to Democracy, Individuality, and Family." |
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The Great American Textbook Scandal |
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David McClintick |
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The nasty scrap inside California's process for picking its public school textbooks shows why publishers and educrats must share some of the blame for poor test results.
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The Myth of Teacher Qualifications |
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Chris Klicka |
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Most education officials publicly claim that teachers need special “qualifications” in order to be effective. As a result, public education organizations often promote legislation or an interpretation of the law which would require home school parents to have one of three qualifications: 1) a teacher certificate, 2) a college degree, or 3) pass a “teacher’s exam.” Although this seems reasonable on the surface, such requirements not only violate the right of parents to teach their children as guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but virtually all academic research documents that there is no positive correlation between teacher qualifications (especially teacher certification requirements) and student performance. |
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The Seduction of Homeschooling Families |
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Chris Cardiff |
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Do the public school authorities feel threatened by homeschooling? Judging by their efforts to lure homeschooling families into dependence on local school districts, the answer is apparently yes. For the last several years, homeschooling has been the fastest growing educational alternative in the country. The sheer number of homeschoolers represent a distinct threat to the hegemony of the government school monopoly. Qualitatively, the academic success of homeschoolers, measured by standardized test scores and recruitment by colleges, debunk the myth that parents need to hire credentialed experts to force children to learn.
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