RIP John Taylor Gatto

John Gatto was my mentor teacher my first year of teaching in NYC circa 1990. I think he’d already been named NYC Teacher of the Year twice by that time although I didn’t know it. He would leave teaching the year after I knew him because “he didn’t want to hurt children anymore.” But I didn’t know that either. I was too busy.. too surrounded by my experience in my first year as a teacher in NYC to really see what else was going on. Mostly, I remember his room because there was next to no light, and the walls were so plastered with hand written posters detailing little pieces of his philosophy on them that you’d be hard pressed to find an inch of uncovered wall or window. I think he had 8th graders or perhaps 9th graders. Most of his kids were off on internships around the city which I later found out was one of his signature accomplishments. He didn’t have many kids there in the dark, and he didn’t seem to interact with them much. It might have been the days I came there, but I didn’t see life in that room. I think he was probably right to retire then.

My perception of John at the time was that he was at war with the whole idea of school, and he seemed less interested in what we should do to help educate and guide children than in what we should not do. His angst around around schooling was primarily focused on compulsion. He didn’t believe in it. He seemed to think that no one should have to do things they didn’t want to do which seemed a little corny granola to me. I wondered whether he thought that we would have running water, flush toilets, food that we didn’t have to scratch out of the soil, or roofs over our heads if no one did things they didn’t want to do. I considered his idea that the free, unfettered child in the natural state resolves all their own needs in their own time as a kind of unschooler, magical thinking (although I don’t think the word unschooler had been invented yet). Perhaps he was right and it would all work itself out… like wikipedia or an upside down bottle that rights itself in the water. Or maybe not.

All I knew at the time was that his classroom was dark, and that I was a minor inconvenience. His big advice for me was to get out of teaching before I became a part of tbe system that destroys children. I didn’t get a sense that anything he was doing was better than what I was about to do. So, I ignored his advice. I am now closing in on what may be my last years in the classroom. I’m where he was when he was my designated mentor. I wasn’t an unschooler then, and I’m not one now. Still, I’m sorry to hear that he died. He reminded me of an old war horse. Rest in Peace, John Gatto.

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