John Taylor Gatto

Biography Gatto was born to Andrew Michael Mario and Frances Virginia ( Zimmer) Gatto in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Pittsburgh. In his youth he attended public schools throughout the Pittsburgh Metro Area including Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown as well as a Catholic boarding school in Latrobe. He attended numerous undergraduate and graduate institutions.

According to Gatto, he started working as a copywriter scripting commercials in New York City in the late 1950s. In the spring of 1960, he borrowed his roommate's teaching license, went into Harlem to work as a substitute teacher and earned his teaching certificate in 1960. In 1963, he was hired as a fulltime 8th grade English teacher at Intermediate School 44 on New York City's Upper West Side. Gatto moved on to Lincoln Academy (now Horizons Middle School) in 1981, which he described as a dumping ground for kids with behavior problems. Gatto ended his teaching career at Booker T. Washington Junior High in Spanish Harlem.

Gatto also ran for the New York State Senate, 29th District in 1985 and 1988 as a member of the Conservative Party of New York against incumbent David Paterson. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991 and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living." He then began a public speaking and writing career, and has received awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville 1997 Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom.

Gatto promoted homeschooling, and specifically unschooling and open source learning.

Gatto was featured in the 2011 Evangelical Christian film IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America. The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto was released in early 2012 by Tragedy and Hope Communications.

Personal life Gatto was married to Janet (MacAdam) with whom he spent half the year in New York City and the other half of the year at their farmhouse in upstate New York. On page 153, he wrote: “Between 1840 and 1860, male schoolteachers were cleansed from the Massachusetts system and replaced by women. A variety of methods was used, including the novel one of paying women slightly more than men in order to bring shame into play in chasing men out of the business.” Gatto does not source this claim and it's unclear where it came from. While the profession was feminized in this period, it was related to a concurrent shift to professionalization and the changing dynamics around women's roles. On page 162, he wrote: “If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.” Gatto’s use of this statistic is misleading. The Swiss high school structure offers multiple tracts for students. About a quarter of students in the country elect to follow an academic track and about three-quarters participate in a combination of academics and vocational training or apprenticeships but most virtually all young people pursue commencement level education. There are additional demarcations within different programs, based on where a student lives and what they’re studying. On page 163, he wrote: “Even thirty years after Waterloo, so highly was Prussia regarded in America and Britain, the English-speaking adversaries selected the Prussian king to arbitrate our northwest border with Canada. Hence the Pennsylvania town ‘King of Prussia.’” According to the King of Prussia Historical Association, the city was named for a prominent inn located in the area. It’s believed the inn was built in 1709 and named by its Prussian builder for the recently crowned king, Frederick I. The battle of Waterloo was in 1815. On page 164, he wrote: “Prussia itself was a curious place, not an ordinary country unless you consider ordinary a land which by 1776 required women to register each onset of their monthly menses with the police.” It is unclear where he got this claim from as there does not appear to be any writing from English-language historians of women's history that supports this claim.

In addition to specific claims or inaccurate quotes, Gatto relied on the "factory model" myth in his arguments against public education. Advocates of the myth, such as Gatto, claim that schools were based on factories or focused on preparing children to work in factories. Educational historians describe the phrase as misleading and an inaccurate representation of the development of American public education.

In 2025, Hazard Spence completed an IndieGoGo funded project, openhistory.education, to connect Gatto's writing to sources. In several instances, Spence was not able to identify a source for quote or claim Gatto had written or identified Gatto had misattributed a quote. For example, on page 166, Gatto wrote: "Goethe said Frederick 'saw Prussia as a concept, the root cause of a process of abstraction consisting of norms, attitudes and characteristics which acquired a life of their own. It was a unique process, supra-individual, an attitude depersonalized, motivated only by the individual’s duty to the State.'" Spence was not able to find the source for this claim. Spence identifies that Gatto misattributed a Victor Hugo quote on page 173, and that he "embellished" a passage from an essay by William Torrey Harris.

Selected bibliography Articles and essays "Against School." Harper’s Magazine (September 2003), pp. 33–38. "How public education cripples our kids, and why." A Short, Angry History of compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

Books Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Critical Commentary. New York: Monarch Press (1975). . . Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers (1992). Foreword by Thomas Moore. . . The Exhausted School: The First National Grassroots Speakout on the Right to School Choice: Carnegie Hall, New York City. New York: Oxford Village Press (1993). Preface by Patrick Farenga. . . A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books (2002). . . The Underground History of American Education. New York: Oxford Village Press (2001). . . Revised edition (2017) by Oxford Scholars Press (New York) features a foreword is by U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, an introduction by David Ruenzel, and an afterword by Richard Grove of Tragedy and Hope Media. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island, B.C. (Canada): New Society Publishers (2009). . . The Adventures of Snider, the CIA Spider, by John Taylor Gatto (2017) Lost Tools Press. Illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert. .

Filmography Documentaries Human Resources (2010) IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity (2011) Thrive: What on Earth Will It Take? (2011) The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto (2012) Sourced transcript. Bibliography and references.