John Taylor Gatto

I've been meaning to write about John Taylor Gatto's talks that I went to way back in February at the unschooling conference, but well, I've been just a little bit busy. But I made use of some of his advice the other morning, so I thought maybe it was time to talk about him a bit.

If you don't know who John Taylor Gatto is, I recommend looking into it and finding out. He's a fascinating guy. Was a NYC teacher for many years, and won the NYC teacher of the year award three times. After he won it for the third time he resigned, speaking in front of the state govt. in Albany and publishing his resignation speech in the New York Times, saying that he thought that school actually hurts children and he didn't want to take part in it anymore. He has spent his time since then writing books and speaking around the country about education.

He said a lot of things, more than I can cover here obviously. But I'll just go over a few of them. One thing was that we baby our children for too long--and that's not doing them any favors. By expecting so little of them (that is, by not expecting them to be self-directed, contributing members of society until they're 21 or so) we are short-changing them. He had so many amazing stories about his students who had accomplished incredible things by about age 15 or so... he served as their mentor, helping them to find and seize opportunities based on their experiences and interests, and he recommended that we do the same with our children. Help them find or create an internship, or to start a business. Have them volunteer at a charity that interests them or where they will build skills that will help them attain their future goals, and make sure to talk to whoever is running the charity and tell that person not to patronize your kid, but to expect of your kid what would be expected of any volunteer, regardless of age. It got George and me talking about what he could do, and we've been thinking that next year he might possibly start volunteering as a tutor in his old kindergarten classroom once a week or so; if it goes really well, he could possibly start his own tutoring business from there. We'll see!

Another thing Gatto suggested was to have your kid think of what he wanted to do with his life, and then sit down and make a list of the skills needed to do that, and then brainstorm about ways to acquire or hone those skills. The idea is that kids should be more actively involved in planning and directing their education. I actually really liked this idea, and have been meaning to do this with George for quite some time now. We finally got around to at least getting started with it yesterday. But I think I'm really too tired to write about it now, so I'll leave the rest for tomorrow....