Speaking about the impacts on societies and individuals of the forced schooling system, John Taylor Gatto propelled forward the momentum gained by the unSchooling Oppression conference.

Following in the lead of David F. Noble who opened the conference Monday night, Gatto too believes there are major problems within the educational system. Problems solvable only by deschooling the self. Unlike Noble though, Gatto does not believe in challenging and infiltrating the system but rather in taking it down. In the context of rule-breaking though, Gatto is quite similar to Noble, and like him, professes self-determination, autonomy, and the fight against authority. ‘You cannot replace one educational system with another system’ he says, explaining that education is always a custom-made job that starts at self-examination.

‘You are the architects to your own education. You are the only ones who know precisely what you need’[/b]- John T. Gatto

Long-time teacher in New York and winner of the Teacher of The Year award several years in a row Gatto got to know the educational system intimately. This talk was concentrated on his experience and a letter he has written to his granddaughter. Though he personally attended 2 Universities, in this letter he portrays his attempt to dissuade her from even enrolling. He supports this by pointing out the greatest leaders and most economically successful have had nothing but mediocre grades throughout their secondary and post-secondary educations. This he believes is a direct proof that the goal system with which so many fall into the belief that attending college perpetuates success is false.

Every sentence of Gatto’s talk was jam-packed with complex analyses of the educational system. All of which have lead to the same point- in essence, the system of education both in forced schooling and in colleges perpetuates the production of a manageable, controllable population. A population easily dividable into what he calls ‘winners’, ‘losers’, and ‘mediocracies’. It is a laboratory of dividing people who would otherwise be allies.’ Yet, the ‘winners’ are not successful students of the system but rather those who defy it, those who do not waste their time by carefully following its guidelines.

‘This supremely parasitic organism’ says Gatto while describing the system of forced schooling ‘would have been rejected long ago if it did not work to produce a population privy to positions of policy making’.

Like trainable flees we become indoctrinated by first having our wills broken by teachers who cannot connect with their students because their jobs become a perpetuation of the wrong values. ‘The current schooling system serves to the deliberate destruction of the imagination’ while ‘obedience and self-subordination is the only thing Universities and Colleges truly expect from their students.’

Changing the system then must be derived from a complete rethinking of mass-education. ‘Genuine school reform cannot be about attendance and test-scores. Tests, as the gatekeeper of responsibility destroy national wealth by diverting power to the wrong people. As every school administrator knows, test scores correlate with nothing except the next test score. ’

Finally, touching on the process of the school itself, Gatto reminisces about his one-time techniques. Unlike other teachers, he did not allow distractions like bells, subjects, and recesses in his classrooms. He believes containing children within a school where they are constantly distracted means teachers fail at their one most important goal. This goal is mentoring students to teach themselves through learning to concentrate and in the meantime gaining a love for learning. Summarizing his talk, Gatto concludes ‘the single determinant most commonly found among geniuses is concentration’