122 The Character Of A Village: The
Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter Ten
The Character of a Village
Each person in a village has a face
and a name, even a nickname. Anonymity is
impossible, for the villagers are
not a mass... a village has its own language, its customs,
its rhythms... its life is
interior.... a village cannot be global.
— Robert Vachon
The Character Of A Village
Before I went to first grade I could
add, subtract, and multiply in my head. I knew my
times
tables not as work but as games Dad played on drives around Pittsburgh.
Learning
anything was easy when you felt like
it. My father taught me that, not any school.
When I went to first grade I could
read fluently. I loved to read grown-up books I