An Educated Person

John Taylor Gatto: What Is An Education?
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Schooling Is One Thing, Education Is AnotherBy John Taylor Gatto
The question "What Is An Education?" has so many interlocking parts that no short essay can possibly be comprehensive, yet everyone would agree that both an education and a schooling have to have goals. You can't get anywhere unless you have a destination in mind!
Let me offer you 11 personal observations based on living a long time and living a long time as a schoolteacher. If kids get a sense there is no firm hand on the tiller, they have an unfortunate tendency to eat you alive! Also, they aren't very forgiving where what they consider "wasting their time" is concerned, and as you've probably already learned, the various goals of "the future" or "getting into a college" don't have much staying power with kids.
No matter who I taught or where I taught I always set out to let the kids know that I had definite goals in mind which would take years to achieve but which, I was determined, nobody could disregard without hurting themselves. Whatever "subject" I taught, I would relate the classroom abstraction to one of 11 principles I felt constituted the core of an educated human being.
In the hope you might find some use for a list, which took me years to compile, here they are:
1. An educated person writes his own script through life. He is not a character in a government play, nor does he mouth the words of any intellectual's utopian fantasy. He is self-determined.
2. An educated person know the ways of the human heart; he is hard to cheat or fool.
3. An educated person knows his rights and knows how to defend them.
4. Time does not hang heavily on an educated person's hands. She can be alone. She is not at a loss for what to do with time.
5. An educated person possesses useful knowledge: how to build a house, how to make clothing, how to build a boat, how to grow food, how to ride, dance, hunt, how to be physically masterful. Why would you want your daughter to know the name of the president of Iraq until she knew the name of the tree outside her window? Why would you want your son to understand Mogadishu until he understood how to scramble an egg? How were you ever sold such a bill of goods? Don't answer that, we both know - in school.
6. An educated person possesses a blueprint of personal value, a philosophy. This philosophy tends toward the absolute, it is not plastically relative (*altering to suit circumstances). An educated person clarifies his own values without advice from agents of the state. An educated person knows at all times who she is, what she will tolerate, where to find peace. But at the same time an educated person is aware of and respects community values and strange values.
7. An educated person can form healthy attachments wherever he is because he understands the dynamics of relationships.
8. An educated person accepts and understands his own mortality and its seasons. He understands that without death and aging nothing would have any meaning. An educated person learns from all his ages, even from the last minute of his life.
9. An educated person can discover truth for himself; he has intense "awareness" of the profound significance of being and the profound significance of being here.
10. An educated person can figure out how to be useful to others, and in trading time, insight and service to meet the needs of others he can earn the material things he needs to sustain a wholesome life.
11. An educated person has the capacity to create new things, new experiences, new ideas.
Everything you teach should be directly related to this package, I think. If it is, and it is clear that it is, you will have no trouble with kids - and you will discover surprisingly that you are learning as much as you teach.
© John Taylor Gatto
Editor's Note: Mr. Gatto's generosity with permission to reprint his work is legendary. However, he has specifically requested that Homefires inform readers that this particular piece is copyrighted and is not to be further reproduced. Contact the author for more information.