The book that is the subject of this review is A Different Kind of Teacher, which is a collection of essays and speeches given by the author, John Taylor Gatto, and released in 2001. This is Gatto's follow-up to his previous collection, entitled Dumbing Us Down, which was reviewed here previously, and represents a growth of the author's disillusionment with the modern school system of the United States.

The essays and speeches are grouped into three main sections, each with their own purpose. The first section, "Schoolrooms Speak Bluntly," examines some of the circumstances under which Gatto developed his ideas of school, while the second section, "Analyzing the System," delves much further into the history of schooling as an institution that parents are forced, under threat of law enforcement, to send their children for their entire natural young lives. The final section of the book, "The Search for Meaning," is the author's analysis of how school actually teaches children and its results in society, what really matters in life, and what conversational and critical thinking skills a child should develop and which development school discourages.

Gatto displays great skill and passion in his criticisms of compulsory schooling, and suggests that no amount of "reform," money, or other solutions will ever contribute to repairing a system that breaks children. In fact, the more dysfunctional their students turn out, the more proof that school has done its job. These results are contrasted by the author with famous individuals who had failed at school but excelled at educating themselves, such as Benjamin Franklin, as well as with examples of his own students who simply had no time to waste by going to school. These anecdotes, including a short essay written by one of Gatto's students, provide a stark contrast with the author's description of children who have been put through the school institution from start to finish.

These children, according to Gatto, are much more likely to be unable to think critically, take responsibility for their own lives, and find themselves with no real meaning in life. The emotional dependency created by the school system encourages this, as children are taught to chase after A's, gold stars, standardized test grades, and other meaningless achievements. They are meaningless because the student is given no opportunity for self-reflection and the grades are based on standards that are a result of research by professional think-tanks who simply practice their theories, untested or not, on unsuspecting children. States, administrators, and teachers are given these standards to enforce with no critical analysis of them and are put under enormous pressure to have their students and themselves conform to these directives from above, and parents are told how angry to be at their children based on these same abstractions.

Gatto also sees the roots of social ineptness in the modern schooling system. Because students are alienated from each other and forced by strangers to compete with other strangers in competitions that many of them are simply not interested in, there is little other possible result than the current litigious nature of society, where seventy percent of the world's lawyers make their home in the US. People are forgetting the concepts of family and community life, denying responsibility for their lives and this is a direct result of the irresponsibility that schooling allows its students.

There is no solution to these problems to be found in our concept of school as it exits at the present. According to the author, schooling serves a much different and contrary position than does education. A person can always educate himself on any subject that they are interested in, whether it be learning about the history of his family, how to build a house, or how to master solitude. Learning for an educated person is always interdisciplinary, according to Gatto, and so is life. A product of schooling, though, will be dependent on other forms of authoritarian teaching, such as television, to provide superficial compartmentalized "subjects," with no relation to each other and no possibility for analysis. This type of schooling has both the questions and the answers delivered in prethought thoughts designed as pretty packages written by the newest wave of advertising executives and soap opera writers.

Possibly the most insightful parts of the book are when Gatto displays his mastery of language and with to get his point across. For example, in discussing the role of school in the economy, he states that "Our own economy requires a managed mass of levelled, spiritless, anxious, family-less, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Coke and Pepsi is a subject worth arguing about." And further in the book is when he brings up the topic of what really matters in life: "The truth is, if we can believe advertisements, what matters to most Americans is personal ownership of machines... Yet here we are, all of us, frantically lost in a tunnel of loneliness, cut off from each other, disliking ourselves, envying those with superior machines."

A Different Kind of Teacher goes to great length to explain that the only kind of teacher is oneself. The result of decades of mass forced schooling has been vast numbers of people who are still dependent on others to tell them what to do, even though this makes them less and less happy with themselves and others. As Gatto states in the last essay in the book, "An educated person writes his own script through life;" a schooled person, on the other hand, follows a tragic script given to him by someone he has never met and who cares nothing for him, and he follows this script to its tragic end of constant anger, desperation, and depression.

About the Author

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