For more than a decade, former New York City and State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto has been among the most insightful and outspoken critics of American schooling, and an influential visionary of the future of education. Through hundreds of public talks, articles, interviews, and classroom projects, Gatto has shown decisively where our failing schools have gone wrong and what can be done to fix them. In A Different Kind of Teacher, the bestselling author of Dumbing Us Down has collected his most important writings of the past ten years -- reports, meditations, action plans, and jeremiads -- that will change forever the reader's understanding of how our system of education really operates, and how it can be rescued. Book jacket.

Gatto analyzes the roots of the modern American education system, outlining prescriptions for revitalizing the system, advocating greater emphasis on critical analysis, creativity, practicality, and real-world exposure in the curriculum. He calls on educators and administrators to acknowledge student's need for a spiritual and ethical framework upon which to build a good life.

With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s "guerrilla teaching." John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).

The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn. John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction , now available in paperback, focuses on mechanisms of traditional education which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down , introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against conventional schooling. Gatto demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, he argues, is to render the common population manageable. To that end, young people must be conditioned to rely upon experts, to remain divided from natural alliances and to accept disconnections from their own lived experiences. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence. Escaping this trap requires a strategy Gatto calls "open source learning" which imposes no artificial divisions between learning and life. Through this alternative approach our children can avoid being indoctrinated-only then can they achieve self-knowledge, good judgment, and courage.

Meet Miss Bindley—an ordinary teacher with an unusual appetite. Miss Bindley doesn’t eat the usual fare like tuna melts and meatloaf. Instead, when her stomach grumbles, it’s the class pets she has her eye—er, stomach—on. Watch out! You never know who might be next.

The underground history of the American education will take you on a journey into the background, philosophy, psychology, politics, and purposes of compulsion schooling.

Bestselling author Tony Humphreys provides innovative and practical ways to bring about a more positive climate within staffrooms and classrooms.