TED: Ideas worth spreading. Why Schools Don't Educate. I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean.
A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine. We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto. Call me Mr.
Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. John Taylor Gatto - Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling.