You Can't Get an Education From School Books

John Taylor Gatto is the New York Teacher of the Year and author of Dumbing Us Down. This is excerpted from his keynote speech at the Alliance for Parental Involvement in Education Conference.

One good way to see the difference between school books and real books is to examine the different customs that separate librarians from school teachers. Librarians are the custodians of real books. And school teachers are the custodians of school books. Somewhere in the differences we're going to find a key to unlock the secret of the war between education and schooling.

To begin with, the libraries I've visited have always been comfortable and quiet, places where you can read instead of just pretending to read. People of all ages work side by side in a library not just a pack of age-segregated kids. For some reason libraries are not age-segregated nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans demand segregation from those who would read their texts. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, and doesn't grade my reading. The librarian appears to trust me. The librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps me when I want help, not when it's decided that I need help. If I feel like reading all day long that's OK with the librarian. I'm not told to stop reading at regular intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home, too. It doesn't send letters to my mother reporting on my library behavior. It doesn't make recommendations or issue orders about how I should use my time at home.

As I said before, the library doesn't have a tracking system. Everyone is mixed together there indiscriminately and by self-selection. And there are no records at all detailing a reader's past victories or defeats. If the books I want are available, I get them--even if that deprives a reader more gifted and talented than I am of the book. If I come first, I get the book. The library doesn't play favorites for any reason. It's very class blind. It's very talent blind. And that seems proper in a country that calls itself a democracy. The library never humiliates me by posting ranked lists of good readers for all to see. It presumes good reading is its own reward and doesn't need to be held up as an object lesson to bad readers.

One of the strangest differences between library and school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a real library, although bad kids have exactly the same access to libraries as good kids do. I've taken thousands of bad kids into real libraries; I've released them illegally throughout my teaching career to real libraries. And not once, not once in 29 years did I have a complaint. The library never makes predictions about my future based on my past reading habits; nor does it imply that my days will be carefree if I read Shakespeare and troubled if I read Barbara Cartland. It tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes that free men and women are always eccentric.

Finally, the library has real books, not school books. Its books are not written by collective pens, nor selected by screening committees. Its real books conform only to the private curriculum of each author, and not to the invisible curriculum of a government bureaucracy. Real books are a vehicle to transport us into an inner realm of absolute solitude where nobody else can come. Real books generate unmonitored (I like to say "unmonitored;" I wish we could sing it together) mental growth.

School books are tools made of paper. They are vehicles of training; they reinforce the school routines of close order drill, public thinking, endless surveillance, endless ranking, and endless intimidation. School books are a crowd-control device plain and simple, and only the very, very innocent or cynical see differences between good and bad ones. Both kinds do exactly the same job. In that respect they are much like television whose function as a plug-in drug is much more powerful than any trivial differences between the programming of the public channel and the programming of the worst ABC show. Real books educate. School books school. When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling. You cannot have it both ways.