1. Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up! : The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up! 

Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the 
wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see 
this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant 
principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT 
UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her 
body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her. 

Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen 
thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were 
painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids 
their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little 
Janey or mine. 

Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of 
psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the 
system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this 
precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, 
having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged 
meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the 
country, or the strange lady who lives next door. 

I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to 
school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, 
Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, 
sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what 
the words meant. 




In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey 
as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she: 

1 . Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out. 

2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office. 

3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's 
apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief. 

4. All the above. 




You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to 
surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even 
though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them 
in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. 
From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. 
Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened? 

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who 
needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay 
that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so 
docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher? 

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such 
as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You 
have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know 
nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state 
knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of 
social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. 
What does it mean? 

One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any 
teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or 
anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the 
confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don't have opportunity to know 
those things. How did this happen? 

Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans 
showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child's mind and 
character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family 
and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that 
trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? 
There isn't any. 

The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is 
$200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the 
child's name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each 
kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than 
the average home in New York costs. You wouldn't build a home without some idea 
what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect 
strangers tinker with your child's mind and personality without the foggiest idea what 
they want to do with it. 

Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can 
sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to 
customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can't sue a 
priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue. 



If you can't be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical 
safety; if you can't be guaranteed anything except that you'll be arrested if you fail to 
surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean? 

What exactly is public about public schools? That's a question to take seriously. If 
schools were public as libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and 
sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the time. 
Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction has spanned many decades. Only in 
Orwell's Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin doctors of the twentieth century such 
as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising combines, is there anything public about 
public schools. 



I Quit, I Think