this may not honor him want to welcome
everybody here and particularly john
taylor gatto coming all this way to
speak on a topic that Ralph Waldo
Emerson said almost first a yawn on us
which is education Dorothy Sayers says
the reason that all of us in a sense
have a right to speak about education is
because we have all gone through some
process of education and in a sense Mis
education and she says that the people
that didn't learn anything in that
process should be the ones we should
perhaps listen to most because they have
something to tell us about it and on the
way here as I was driving I was thinking
about my own educational experience and
in some ways it's probably not
dissimilar to a lot of people in this
room who have been through American
educational institutions I went to
school here in California I also went to
school in the East Coast and I was
thinking on the way I was thinking about
my teachers because teachers are such
interesting figures in our lives and I
was thinking about my first grade
teacher mrs. Gilmore I remember her name
I can see her black hair he's very tall
thin lady and she was almost a classic
school marm the beginning of my problems
was in that classroom and then I
remember my second grade teacher but
particular I remember my third grade
teacher Miss Williams because there was
an event that happened in third grade
that had a very deep impact on me and
that was I was falsely accused of
something and I remember the mortified
state that I was in when somebody came
into the classroom and whispered into
her ear and they both looked at me in
front of all these small children and
then the teacher said oh we don't like
boys that do that and I was completely
nonplussed I didn't know what they were
talking about and I was taken to the
principal's office and whacked with a
paddle and this was a complete case of
false testimony by
one of my arch enemies in the playground
that was my first real taste of
injustice that I was the arbitrary
victim of false testimony and I suffered
the consequences and that taught me
something about the nature of justice
and injustice and the sense that people
feel when they're wrong when there's an
injury which is a beautiful word coming
from the Latin injuria unjust then I
remember going into fourth grade mr.
foot and then in fifth grade things
began to change radically I had a
teacher called Dennis HOF slinger and
this was the beginning of summer he'll
he'd read this and this was the 1960s
and a lot of experimentation and we
moved into a whole other realm of
teaching so I went from these very old
school school mARMS to a very radical
young man who was dedicated on undoing
that damage that had been done and he
did his own damage unintentionally
obviously and then sixth grade mrs.
Johnson I remember these people so well
because I lived with them for a year of
my life and listened to them
eighth grade I went to an experimental
school in Marin County that had four
quads earth wind fire and air and each
one of these quads based on testing you
were put into a quad in order to enhance
your natural aptitudes so I was put into
sea school which was for people that
were gifted with language reading and
writing son school was for mathematics
and then they actually had wood school
which was for arts and crafts hand type
things and then they had a music school
and then something very radical happened
major disruption in my own education I
went to a prep school on the East Coast
and went into deep shock I had gone
through
eight years of California and suddenly I
was thrust into an institution on the
East Coast that was founded in 1789 and
was run by Jesuits it was a very very
difficult experience for me personally
and I remember just having a lot of
really difficulty there dealing with the
East Coast children that were very
different from the West Coast there was
a lot of bullying and I remember a novel
that really impacted me was a novel
called separate peace because I lived
that experience and that novel had a
major impact on me when I was in ninth
grade and the pain that was inflicted
you know this recent event of hazing I
think what was so troubling about that
not the hazing hazings been around in
this country for a long long time but
young girls were doing it I was like
Chris Rock said that you know that this
world upside down when the best rapper
is a white guy and the best golfers a
black guy the same case here we've got
young girls that are hazing brutally if
that's equality I'm you know deeply
worried about what we're doing to these
girls because I think that making girls
more like men is actually the wrong way
to go it's the other way around it's
actually the men need to learn how to be
more like those natural qualities that
women have mercy and compassion I mean
this is the humanization process we
don't call our schools alma mater z' for
nothing the nurturing mother I mean
that's what a school is supposed to be
it's supposed to give you your humanity
so in looking at my own education I
couldn't take two years of that on the
East Coast and then I went to a
Augustinian school on the west coast
which was much easier and that's the
difference probably between the Jesuits
and the Augustinians ones a militant
order and the other is less so after
that I was down in a junior college in
Southern California and I had a
conversion experience it was a very
powerful conversion experience and I was
I was uninterested in pursuing my
college anymore
and I dropped out and I went overseas
and I spent three and a half years with
a person who I really feel I got my real
education with this person like one of
the things that probably the greatest
American novelist Herman Melville said
that my college was not Yale or Harvard
my college was a whaling ship and that
really was the college that I went to
was with an individual who was an
extraordinary human being and it was
very difficult could be with this person
but at the same time it was incredibly
beneficial and he exposed me to a whole
range of thought I realized in thinking
back about my own educational experience
what I learned was rarely in school I
was fortunate to grow up in a house that
had a very large library and I remember
very clearly discovering when I was
probably about 13 G de Maupassant and my
mother had a very early edition of his
short stories and I read that from cover
to cover and I can really recall those
stories to this day the necklace I will
never forget that story and Oscar Wilde
my older brother was interested I read
voraciously the plays The Importance of
Being Earnest and his short stories the
Happy Prince and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
and I had a deep interest also in the
Civil War and I read Shelby Foote and an
interest in world war two which a lot of
young male Americans at least when I was
growing up had an interest in that
subject what I remember in school is
that I remember so little of it in terms
of just what I was taught I can
literally only remember one thing in my
entire seventh grade year I remember the
teacher mr. Smith who in the biology
class told us it was impossible for
Jesus to have been born a virgin birth
because men determined sex and Mary only
had a xx chromosome and that's literally
all I remember from seventh grade
somebody said gentlemen should have
least have forgotten Latin right so I
mean that's a problem in education that
you forget and some say education is
what remains after you've forgotten
everything else but when I spent this
three years with this person what
happened to me next was I got a
scholarship to the United Arab Emirates
and I went into an Arab school and I was
literally put in third grade and I was
now 20 I was 20 years old I was put in
third grade because I did not know
Arabic it was really interesting being
in this third grade because one I came
to really understand the whole problem
with the Arab world from that the
Arabians are not unlike the Americans
most of our problems are in the
educational system and I really do
believe that but the punitive measures
that were used in that school the
humiliation the just horrendous pedagogy
that was practiced by these teachers who
inherited the same styles from their
prior teachers and this is what happens
we meet a said we recreate ourselves we
just keep giving the next generation the
same problems that we too had but from
there what happened to me was a very
profound experience and that was I
discovered West Africans when I was in
the United Arab Emirates and from that
discovery it led to studying with them
and these were some of the most
extraordinary people that I've ever met
and I would contest that they are some
of the most extraordinary people left on
the planet they were all raised nomads
that they had extraordinary education
prodigious memories they absorbed
massive amounts of information when they
were young children and they mastered
what we used to call in this culture the
liberal arts
they focused very heavily on grammar on
rhetoric on logic and and it was very
odd to meet West Africans Bedouin nomads
who literally were learning traditional
logic these were people that lived in
tents and most of their books were
handwritten that had been written down
and passed on through centuries I mean
really an amazing experience for me but
what struck me most about these people
was their presence it was not simply
what they knew but how that knowledge
permeated their experience of life and
how it translated into their behavior
and I ended up studying with them and
spent several years with this group of
people and even I went from the Emirates
after four years with them I went to
Mauritania and lived in the Sahara when
I got to the Sahara I was just so
overwhelmed by a people that basically
had no Ministry of Education so to speak
they had no school system they had no
salaried teachers and they had no
budgets for books nothing and yet these
extraordinary schools exist out there
and I think if you actually saw these
schools you would just marvel at their
existence and they have been there for
literally centuries and in studying with
them what I realized was that there are
certain techniques in education that
have been understood for millennia and
they have very profound impact on the
acquisition and the use of knowledge and
one of the things that these people
understood very clearly was the
difference between information and
between knowledge and they distinguish
between those two terms the idea of
people that have a lot of information
but don't know how to process that
information don't know how to make it
useful for them and they distinguish
between knowledge and between wisdom and
just as our language has different words
for these different ideas their language
also reflects that and I probably would
assume that most human languages do in
looking at their educational system and
how they taught and how they imparted
knowledge there were certain things that
I would like to share with you about
that in terms of looking at a classical
versus
modern education and I'm using a West
African Arabian model but I believe that
this model could also be found in
traditional European and even in
traditional American society where I
think there's a big difference is that
in the traditional Arabian a sense of it
they really saw the Democratic nature of
Education there was an idea that
everybody was entitled to attempt to
learn and I once read a beautiful legal
opinion what's known as a fatwa which is
a non-binding legal opinion a beautiful
fatah from a Moroccan scholar one should
easy educational endowments came from
the Muslim world and they were
introduced into the west through the
Muslim world which has been very well
documented by George Makdissi
in his book the rise of colleges there
were beautiful endowments that were
established for students and at one
shitty she was asked by the head of a
school in Fez in Morocco what do we do
with a student who's been with us and is
not benefitting at all from the
educational process and yet he's on a
scholarship how long should we allow him
to stay before we kick him out and at
once Judy she's answer was give him ten
years and if he hasn't had an opening
from God yet teach him how to raise
sheep or to do something useful
and I just thought that that was
something struck me about that was very
profound the idea that don't just assume
people are uneducated don't just assume
that they're stupid give them actual
time because just as we have different
awakenings in our life our first
awakenings are often sensual awakenings
to touch to feel we have aesthetic
awakenings
we obviously have sexual awakenings and
these are very profound experiences as
we grow some of us have spiritual
awakenings and some of us have
intellectual awakenings just to give you
an example of this I was fortunate
participating in a small group
discussion we studied a book called
reforming education which was written by
Mortimer Adler and Adler was
participating he was more of an honorary
head of this comp
but there was a young man there named
John all good and he told his story of
how he came to become interested in
learning and what happened to him he was
a bricklayer and one day a brick
literally fell on his head from somebody
who was working above him and he was
hospitalized he was comatose when he
came to somebody gave him a book called
how to read a book by Adler and Van
Doren and he'd always had a hard time in
school which is one of the reasons why
he became a bricklayer there was a
chapter that began you have a mind and
he said it was the first time anybody
had ever told him that and he had an
intellectual awakening and Malcolm X
mentions this when he was in the seventh
grade and he told his teacher when he
asked him what do you want to be Malcolm
he was the only black kid in this school
and Malcolm said I want to be a lawyer
and the man said that's not a good job
for a nigger you should be something
like a carpenter you'll never succeed at
that and in some ways it was a benefit
because he probably would have become a
brilliant lawyer so the fact that that
man deterred him from that I think is
probably one of the reasons why we got
Malcolm X who in Indian K's recent book
the 200 most important people in human
history they actually had him in there
because of his contribution to civil
rights which is one of the great events
of certainly Western civilization so we
have these extraordinary awakenings and
one of the things that I realized in
these schools is one they don't like to
start the intellectual awakening too
early in the traditional school systems
they did not begin the educational
process until the age of seven and this
is something that Rudolf Steiner
predicted that if you drop the age of
education from seven to five you will
see that the cycle of a woman will begin
earlier so he related
the biology taking place in a woman with
the time that you start her intellectual
development because if you begin it too
early you're setting in motion something
that has already been mapped out to
occur in a very organized and developed
pattern because there's an unfolding
that's taking place
you cannot hasten the unfolding of a
flower a flower knows when to bloom how
to bloom and what you need to do if
anything is just to provide the water if
it's a indoor flower and if its outdoor
it will take care of itself so this is
part of a deep wisdom that the ancients
had of knowing when to actually begin
the process of Education and there is an
extraordinary tradition from deeply wise
human being alia Bonavia thought it said
play with your children for seven years
and then teach them