Education

• Northern Virginia Community College
• Home Skilled
• Stone Bridge High School

Favorite saying

• "“It is absurd and anti-life to be forced to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to be forced to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry. It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home by demanding that you do its “homework”.” “There isn’t a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge – not even the best ones – although here and there individual teachers, like guerilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.” “How did I survive for nearly thirty years in a system for which I feel such loathing? I want to make a confession in the hope it will suggest strategy to other teachers: I did it by becoming an active saboteur, in small ways and large. What I did resolutely was to teach kids what I’m saying here – that schooling is bad business unless it teaches you to build a boat or a house; that giving strangers personal information about yourself is certainly to their advantage, but seldom your own On a daily basis I consciously practiced sabotage, breaking laws regularly, forcing the fixed times and spaces of schooling to become elastic, falsifying records so the rigid curricula of those places could be what individual children needed. I threw sand in the gears by encouraging new teachers to think dialectically so that they wouldn’t fit into the pyramid of administration. I exploited the weakness of the schools punitive mechanism, which depends on fear to be effective, by challenging it in visible ways, showing I did not fear it, setting administrators against each other to prevent the juggernaut from crushing me. When that didn’t work I recruited community forces to challenge the school ---- businessmen, politicians, parents, and journalists – so I would be given a wide berth. Once, under heavy assault, I ask my wife to run for school board. She got elected, fired to superintendent, and then punished his cronies in a host of imaginative ways. I taught my kids how to cheat destiny so successfully that they created a record of astonishing success that deserves a book someday. Some of my kids left school to go up the Amazon and live with Indian tribes to study on their own the effects of government-dam building on traditional family life; some went to Nicaragua and joined combat teams to study the amazing hold of poetry on the lives of common people in that land; some made award-winning movies; some became comedians; some succeeded at love, some failed. All learned to argue with fate in the form of social engineering.” “Consider the fantasy of teacher certification. Teacher are licensed and paid as though they are specialists, but they rarely are. For example, a science teacher is almost never actually a scientist – a man or woman who thinks about the secrets of nature as a private passion and pursues this interest on personal time. How many science classes in this country actually make any serious attempt to discover anything or add to human knowledge? They are orderly ways of killing time, nothing more. Kids are set to memorize science vocabulary, repeating well-worn procedures certain to work, chanting formulas exactly as they have been indoctrinated to chant commercials from TV. The science teacher is a publicist for political truths set down in state-approved science textbooks.” “Don’t misunderstand me. Teachers are frequently good people, intelligent people, talented people who work very hard. But regardless of how bright they are, how gracefully they “schoolteach” or how well they control children’s behavior (which is, after all, what they are hired to do; if they can’t do that, they are fired, but if they can, little else really matters), the net result of their efforts and our expense is surely very little or even nothing; indeed, often it leaves children worse off in terms of mental development and character formation than they were before being “taught.” Schools that seem to be successful almost always are made to appear so by selective enrollment of self-motivated children.” -John Taylor Gatto ... former public school teacher"