Book Review
John Taylor gatto
Dumbing Us Down
Spirituality, Psychology
Do you ever think, “I want to be my own boss,” yet you fear you cannot survive outside the corporate system? If you think about it, it’s not shocking – you were bred by the school system to be that way.
This book was written in 1992; sadly, it’s still relevant today. It helps us to understand why many of us struggle and fail to set ourselves free from our corporate shackles. The principles we were raised on in school are the values prevalent in corporations today. Here are some excerpts from the book demonstrating the 7 principles of the academic system.
- Confusion
“…a lack of coherence and a host of internal contradictions. Students have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at the constant violations of natural order passed off as quality education. I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny.”
- Class position
“I’ve shown them how to envy and fear better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. The class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.”
- Indifference
“They [students] must turn on and off like a light switch [at the sound of a bell]. Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world without important work to do.”
- Emotional Dependency
“I teach kids to surrender their will [through prizes, honors, and disgraces] to their predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal because rights do not exist inside of a school.”
- Intellectual Dependency
“Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do. It’s one of the biggest lessons I teach.”
- Provisional Self-Esteem
This one is so heinous you need to read it for yourself. If you decide to buy the book, read every word of this and find out where you fall in this system. Discover for yourself if it has any bearing on why you act the way you do.
- One Can’t Hide
Do you know the real agenda of homework? It’s closely related to why you can’t find work-life balance in any job. Jobs are designed to be all-consuming. Find out why.
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? We are programmed in a 12-year curriculum to “know our place” in a corporate system.
As we see, our bosses are just as caught up in this as we are. They have a role to play too. They have been trained to be:
- Indifferent to the suffering of their subordinates
- Threaten by superiority (in superiors and subordinates)
- Intolerant of inferiority
- Destroy/break the spirit of anything that threatens their control
- Performance Improvement Plans (PIP), overly critical evaluations, gaslighting, etc.
“We need to burn this system to the ground!” one reader exclaimed. I agree. We could do that. “It would mean the end of the paycheck – the end of individuals getting paid to be told what to think or do.”
Are you ready for that? If you read this book and identify with it more than you’d like to admit, you may be ready for a change. So, the next question is, how do we repair years (or decades) of learned helplessness?
Paperback: 144 pages
Audio Download: 3 hours, 19 minutes