In 2012, Richard Grove conducted and produced a 6-hour video interview with John Taylor Gatto. For those who don’t have the time to read and digest J.T. Gatto’s excellent work in book form, this interview provides an alternative. I’ve found it to be ideally listened to at double-speed! That makes it an ideal use of the next 2.5 hours of your time as John is a game-changer in the area of education.
Copyright © 2011 TragedyandHope.com
The transcript of the interview is 41,500 words. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Tragedy and Hope and please consider supporting their work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube.
The excerpts, below, are 1/20th of the entire transcript. They are not a summary of the presentation.
RG: is Richard Grove
JTG: is John Taylor Gatto
RG: Is there any connection between frustration and aggression? And what effect does schooling have on that?
JTG: Well, you answer your own question by asking it. The connection is intimate. School removes your volition in all important ways, even who you speak to. Are not they arts of association as valuable or more valuable than anything else you learn when you’re young?
Getting Into Harvard
I read how executive hiring is done and it almost never has to do with your training in whatever you’re been hired for. I’m thinking of Apple now, I believe. Is this the person we’d like to have around three years from now, bend an elbow with, or play golf with or just talk with? And that’s why you’re passed from set of executives, to set of executives. So they can sign off, yeah he’s ok, you know… We don’t tell kids that. It’s people who have the highest grade point average in the highest SAT scores. Well I spent an hour, not so long ago, within 10 years, with the admissions officer of Harvard College and, about 30 years ago an hour with the admissions director at Princeton. And let me tell you their polite dismissal of grades and SAT scores was intimidating to listen to. As if you’d have to be crazy to let somebody in.
Let me see if I can condense how you get into Harvard or Princeton. Of course, you can get into both by donating a building but how do other people get in? They are being analyzed on the basis of their ability to either become wealthy or famous. Either one will work. Fame is like wearing a billboard saying I went to Princeton. There’s that actress Jodie Foster, “I went to Princeton”. Look at where the rest of the actors and directors went, they didn’t go anywhere (laughter). But Jodie did so that’s one we hear about. The Harvard lady said, “we look for a record of excellence and what this excellence consists of.” It’s sometime in the first 18 years of your life, figuring out how to add value to the people around you. She didn’t say this in a way that catches public attention, so you might walk across the United States or bicycle the perimeter of the country or row across the Atlantic Ocean, as a physical way. You might start a little charity or set up some weather service or some pollution monitoring around Hartford. There are a substantial number, a small fraction but a substantial number, of kids doing this as we sit here. They’re writing a record of being able to add value to the community around them.
Hobbies
And then the other fellow, the Princeton guy said the same thing in different words. I asked him in 1968 roughly, asked him what part of a resume submitted to you do you look at first. The answer metaphorically caused my jaw to open. “Hobbies,” he said. I said, “I’ve been taught all my life to leave that off because it’s not germane.” He said, “on the contrary, it’s the only honest information you’re likely to get.” How did someone spend their time when it’s their free choice to spend? He said “it’s a window into their mind and their heart”.
What Kind of Hobbies?
I said what kind of hobbies? He said, “well ideally someone would have a physical hobby, an intellectual hobby and a social hobby”. That would show they are exploring these large… well, physical hobbies you mean football, baseball? Well, he said “it’s better than nothing but we would prefer not to see team sports”. I said I’d been told all my life that team sports identify your ability to work in a team. He said what happens in a team sport is if you decide to dog it, it’s very hard to tell which guy on the line has dogged it or not, or which running back has gone down quicker than he should have gone down. He said we prefer solo hobbies that involve physical danger. You mean you want kids to put their necks at risk? For example, what? He said well horseback riding is a dead giveaway. The horse weighs a half ton or more. If you do trail riding and you don’t know what you’re doing, your head gets caught on the branch and you’re the headless horseman. If the horse doesn’t like you it’ll roll over on top of you. I know immediately because the last time I rode a horse was down in Veracruz, Mexico and the horse didn’t like me and took me out on the main highway with crazed Mexican drivers going a hundred miles an hour in 18 wheelers. And it laid down on top of me. I was terrified! I could see these trucks coming. I didn’t like it and it’s the last time I rode. So he said you have to actually know what you’re doing. You can’t say is this an A job, or a B job . If you live in are intact, it is.
Then he said, “sailing a small boat”. These little 12 footers outside of land. If you don’t know what you’re doing you wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, you know. Or if wind comes up you can’t see landmarks because of the waves. I said, but those things are associated with the prosperous classes. What can somebody in ordinary circumstances do? He says well, we just let somebody in and this is probably one of the nicest factoids in my mind, in my life. We just let someone in who invented his own sport and kept records competing against himself, his past performance, his present performance. It was–get ready for this, visualize this—seat-less unicycle riding over broken terrain. If I had 10 lifetimes the plot of doing that wouldn’t occur to me. Aside from getting on a unicycle, let alone without a seat, let alone riding it over broken terrain. So they let him in because they knew he was on the fast track.
So we tell these lies and, of course, many of the people who tell the lie, believe the lie. Well surely they’re going to take valedictorians. Well, last year Harvard turned down eight out of every ten valedictorians who applied. And the two they took in, they didn’t take in because they were valedictorians. So by removing this component from the student imaginations y, u can control to some extent who even applies to Harvard and then who gets in. Because they don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the IT… “garbage in garbage out”.
Standardized Tests Don’t Matter
The evidence that all of us know standardized tests don’t measure what they claim they measure is that nobody, I mean nobody, that you encounter on the upper reaches of society would dream of hiring somebody on the basis of those tests or grade point averages. You’d be playing Russian roulette because they measure nothing. The grades largely measure that you memorize what you are told to memorize. I mean, there are a few other things but that’s the heart of it. So now you know you have somebody who’s obedient, and probably for a clerk that is a good measure. Not for someone who has to adapt to changing circumstances, you know, by the natural selection process of reality.
Schooled to the Point of Extinction
It’s fairly easy without being a wise guy or very learned as long as you retained the ability to think independently from the data in front of you, to penetrate the masks, the contentions that don’t conform to everyday reality. So no one will hire you as a CEO and ask you what your… but if you examine the data that’s available about big-time politicians. Now we have, and I don’t think it would surprise anybody, that George Bush, the most recent one was a C average high school/prep school and a C average at Yale. What does surprise people is that the candidate he ran against was a C average in prep school, in the C average at Yale, and the lower C average than George Bush. Kerry of Massachusetts. The best evidence that the nation has been schooled to the point of extinction is that they were fraternity brothers at Yale and I’ll skip its interesting reputation; it only has 15 members. And they were fraternity brothers at Yale. There’s 308 million of us! I mean, mathematically I wouldn’t know how to set the odds but they would be stupendous. No one mentioned it, or if they did it was to quickly get over that. That should have been headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Fraternity Brothers at Yale Run for President!”
