Not only is his heart in the right place, but I think he's diagnosed the problem with industrialized mass education extremely well.
And I don't think he's very wrong about the "conspiracy theories," either. Certainly the industrialists of the late 19th century were heavily invested in creating a new "mass man" that they could then employ more effectively for their own purposes, if the schooling were directed to dumbing everyone down to the same low level of un-independent thought and mindless compliance to authority.
(We figured out the same problem 20 years ago, and that's why we're educating our 8 kids at home through high school.)
But, like Neil Postman, another great societal critic, he doesn't really know what to do about the problem, other than "don't do that". It may be there's no real solution, other than to have parents much more involved in their kids' education, which is certainly the ideal.
But even if you posit a need for group schooling, one could do worse than returning to the "little red schoolhouse" approach of the pre-Horace Mann (Prussian-style mass education in Mass.) era, where parents band together and hire teachers/tutors for a smaller group of kids, and really keep their hands on the tiller.
(Yes, there are problems there, too, but certainly much less than the problems that Gatto identifies so well.)
And I don't think he's very wrong about the "conspiracy theories," either. Certainly the industrialists of the late 19th century were heavily invested in creating a new "mass man" that they could then employ more effectively for their own purposes, if the schooling were directed to dumbing everyone down to the same low level of un-independent thought and mindless compliance to authority.
(We figured out the same problem 20 years ago, and that's why we're educating our 8 kids at home through high school.)
But, like Neil Postman, another great societal critic, he doesn't really know what to do about the problem, other than "don't do that". It may be there's no real solution, other than to have parents much more involved in their kids' education, which is certainly the ideal.
But even if you posit a need for group schooling, one could do worse than returning to the "little red schoolhouse" approach of the pre-Horace Mann (Prussian-style mass education in Mass.) era, where parents band together and hire teachers/tutors for a smaller group of kids, and really keep their hands on the tiller.
(Yes, there are problems there, too, but certainly much less than the problems that Gatto identifies so well.)