John Taylor Gatto

"He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called "An Evening With John Taylor Gatto," which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries. In 1992, he was named Secretary of Education in the Libertarian Party Shadow Cabinet, and he has been included in Who's Who in America from 1996 on. In 1997, he was given the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for his contributions to the cause of liberty, and was named to the Board of Advisors of the National TV-Turnoff Week.

"His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001) of which the special author's Pre-Publication Edition (2000) is for sale at this Web site.

"Gatto's office is in New York City, his home in Oxford, New York, where he is currently at work on a documentary film about the nature of modern schooling entitled The Fourth Purpose, with his friend and former student, Roland Legiardi-Laura. For more information about this film, visit The Fourth Purpose. Gatto has been married for forty years to the same woman, and has two grown children and a cat. He hopes to build a rural retreat and library for the use of families pondering local and personal issues of school reform."

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