Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto
Homeschooling is now a revolutionary act.
To widen the margin between the costs of production and the return from sales in a competitive market, the manufacturer depressed wages, lengthened hours, speeded up motions, shortened the worker’s period of rest, deprived him of recreation and education, robbed him in youth of the opportunities for growth, in maturity of the benefits of family life, and in old age of his security and peace.1
— Lewis Mumford
Homeschooling is, at this point, one of the most revolutionary and necessary acts a parent can engage in. Let those without school-age children try to change the system, let them fight the woke board members, the vaccination mandates, the inappropriate books and whatever else the public education apparatus tries to do.
If you’re a parent with school-age children, spend your time and effort educating them the way you want. Pull them out of school. Don’t expend your energy trying to change a system that needs to be dismantled while your children are propagandized, indoctrinated and taught to endure boredom sitting at a desk for hours a day memorizing facts they’ll forget by the next recess bell.
Educate them yourself with other like-minded parents and through various homeschool groups. Do not let the State have them. The State does not care about your children. They don’t. Don’t delude yourself into believing they do. Sending your children off to school for six or seven hours a day where you ultimately have no control with what happens in the classroom does not help your children, except to become what the State wants them to become: obedient citizens that follow orders.
One of the most important things any citizen can do is educate their children and keep them out of public education. It may not be glamorous or make headlines, but it will impact our society for decades and centuries to come. It is that important.
The Educational System Works as Intended
Public education was never about education. It was never about creating independent thinkers and creative minds. It was and is about squashing those aspects so that citizens fit nicely into the kinds of jobs the industrial corporate complex needs to keep everything running smoothly.
John Taylor Gatto in Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling chronicles many people who became very successful without schooling. Some of these very same people (Carnegie and Rockefeller) in order to enrich themselves were responsible for backing and pushing public education that would indoctrinate and prepare children for the kinds of jobs that these men needed filled in their companies. The last thing they wanted were a bunch of geniuses running around from sea to shining sea.
The following comes from Rockefeller’s General Education Board and a document entitled Occasional Letter Number One:
In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands….We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen—of whom we have an ample supply.2
That was written in 1906. Take a look at the literacy rates at around 1930 and after:3
1930 — 98%
1942-44 — 96%
1951 — 81%
1960s — 73%
Much like the U.S.’s medical system where the general health of the citizenry has only deteriorated over the last 50-75 years, the educational system is even worse. Before 1900 fifth graders in Minneapolis were reading:
William Shakespeare
Henry David Thoreau
George Washington
Sir Walter Scott
Mark Twain
Benjamin Franklin
Oliver Wendell Holmes
John Bunyan
Daniel Webster
Samuel Johnson
Lewis Carroll
Thomas Jefferson
Emerson4[bullet list format added]
If teachers required that reading list today in any grade they’d be accused of racism and child abuse. But this is the kind of education that people like William Torrey Harris wanted to get rid of. Harris was the Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. Of him Gatto writes:
The tool to build such a society was psychological alienation, said Harris. To alienate children from themselves so they could no longer turn inward for strength, to alienate them from families, traditions, religions, cultures—so no outside source of advice could contradict the will of the political state.5
This is what the Globalists have been attempting to do on a worldwide scale. There can be no other God except the Globalists if their plans are to work. They’ve attempted to accomplish this by eroding morals, religion, traditions, sexual roles (this is why transgender dogma has been pushed so vehemently over the last 10 years) and the traditional family. These things are not just some natural, societal evolutionary process. It’s intentional and it’s evil.
I’ll end this with a couple of quotes from Gatto:
Formulaic schooling is worthless to common citizens, even destructive. It’s only useful to policymakers and managers. It must be killed, not modified. Attempts to tinker with its ruthless algorithms prolongs our society’s agony and makes the situation worse.6
As I wrote at the beginning, parents, don’t waste your time trying to fix public education. Homeschool your children, or if the term “homeschool” is distasteful to you, “home educate them” or let them “self-educate,” but whatever you do pull them out of school and free their minds and their bodies. Gatto again:
If you wanted general health and vigor in an oncoming generation, would you enforce immobility on it for twelve to twenty years? Would you tie that immobility to constant stresses created by bells and various threats? Would you add to these handicaps the fat-and-sugar-rich diet of school lunches or allow snack wagons and soda pop vendors inside the school orbit? Don’t these provide a direct road to overweight and obesity, ill health, weakness, gracelessness, vulgarity and timidity?7
Yes. Yes, they do.
This is a great book. Like his other book, Dumbing us Down, reading Weapons of Mass Instruction will dispel any doubts you may have about the necessity of homeschooling.
Notes
Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, N.Y., 1934. p. 186.
Gatto, John Taylor, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC Canada, fourteenth printing, 2024, p. 8.
p. 11.
p. 12.
p. 13.
p. 57.
p. 120.