Tag Archives: John Taylor Gatto

The Quest for Education

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Don't take my education!!

Don’t take my education!!

In the southern part of the state and mainly greater-Portland, events at the University of Southern Maine have highlighted for me (and maybe a small cadre of others) the challenges inherent in maintaining the status quo relative to higher education.

Is it possible and even feasible given the current landscape of diminishing public resources for taxpayers to be on the hook for what some consider an outdated education model? Along those same lines, is the current statewide higher education complex and namely, the University of Maine system, viable and more important, sustainable? Continue reading →

Reading books 2012

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Books 2012 01

Why read? That seems to be the question at hand since I’m once more at the end of a calendar year with another assortment of books read over the course of the past 12 months. With a list like this comes some sort of requirement to justify the time I invested in making my way through these books. Hence, I report back to you, dear reader.

The rediscovery of reading transformed my life back in 1997. I say “rediscovery” because like so many, I’d found other second rate substitutes for books and reading in the course of leaving school and entering the realm of work. Now I’ve come back to an even more essential task—reading broadly. I wish a few more of you would begin wrestling with this task. Continue reading →

Broken beyond repair

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Education as a system is broken in America. Whatever method you use to evaluate schools will yield a result that’s disappointing. While there are still good schools and communities where the K-12 model works, most don’t.

In Chicago, a city with nearly 400,000 public school students, a labor impasse finds schoolchildren staying at home for a third day, as teachers picket, demanding changes in how they are evaluated, more autonomy to teach, and an increase in their salaries and benefits. Meanwhile, the students are the losers. Continue reading →