3. The New Individualism: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The New Individualism 



The little essay went off in March and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way I must have 
gotten a note saying it would be published at the editor's discretion, but if so, it was 
quickly forgotten in the press of turbulent feelings that accompanied my own internal 
struggle. Finally, on July 5, 1991, 1 swallowed hard and quit. Twenty days later the 
Journal published the piece. A week later I was studying invitations to speak at NASA 
Space Center, the Western White House, the Nashville Center for the Arts, Columbia 
Graduate Business School, the Colorado Librarian's Convention, Apple Computer, and 
the financial control board of United Technologies Corporation. Nine years later, still 
enveloped in the orbit of compulsion schooling, I had spoken 750 times in fifty states and 
seven foreign countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people made an 
effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell them the truth. 



My hunch is it wasn't so much what I was saying 
that kept the lecture round unfolding, but that a 
teacher was speaking out at all and the curious fact 
that I represented nobody except myself. In the 
great school debate, this is unheard of. Every single 
voice allowed regular access to the national podium 
is the mouthpiece of some association, corporation, 
university, agency, or institutionalized cause. The 
poles of debate blocked out by these ritualized, 
figurehead voices are extremely narrow. Each has a 
stake in continuing forced schooling much as it is. 




As I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often unvoiced, to be free of managed 
debate. A desire to be given untainted information. Nobody seemed to have maps of 
where this thing had come from or why it acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was 
alive and well all over America. 

Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed 
happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed 
village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as 
irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through 
particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, 
but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever 
subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All 
this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling. 



Dewey called this transformation "the new individualism." When I stepped into the job of 
schoolteacher in 1961, the new individualism was sitting in the driver's seat all over 



urban America, a far cry from my own school days on the Monongahela when the Lone 
Ranger, not Sesame Street, was our nation's teacher, and school things weren't nearly so 
oppressive. But gradually they became something else in the euphoric times following 
WWII. Easy money and easy travel provided welcome relief from wartime austerity, the 
advent of television, the new nonstop theater, offered easy laughs, effortless 
entertainment. Thus preoccupied, Americans failed to notice the deliberate conversion of 
formal education that was taking place, a transformation that would turn school into an 
instrument of the leviathan state. Who made that happen and why is part of the story I 
have to tell. 

School As Religion