Includes index.

The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Gatto comes down hard on the industrial one-size-fits-all schooling model. He argues that not only are schools irrelevant to the lives of children, they are in fact damaging. His central thesis is that factory schooling is causing great harm to children and communities. It is an anti-learning, anti-social and anti-democratic activity. Continuous ringing of the bells, from one compartment to another compartment, every day eight hours of confinement, the age-segregation like vegetables, the lack of privacy and constant surveillance, the crazy sequences, cut-off from the working community and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling are designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning - how to think and act - to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior. After teaching for years John Taylor Gatto reached to the sad conclusion that schooling has nothing to do with learning - but to teach young people to conform to the economic and social order. Dumbing Us Down reveals shocking reality to today's school system and has become a beacon for parents seeking alternatives to it.