‘Forced schooling’ does more harm than good, a former teacher of the year claims. Henry Hepburn reports

Schools peddle an elaborate form of social control which “stupefies” children, according to a man once named one of the United States’s best teachers. He described teachers as “stooges” for a social elite which infantilised children to maintain its own supremacy, turning pupils into “spoiled fruit”.

John Taylor Gatto, who made his radical observations at an international conference organised by the Schoolhouse Home Education Assocation in Arbroath, was named New York State teacher of the year in 1991. In the same year, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement to the Wall Street Journal, stating that he no longer wished to “hurt kids to make a living”.

Since then, he has written several books denouncing schools, including Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and the soon-to-be-published Weapons of Mass Instruction.

During a keynote speech lasting two-and-a-half hours, Mr Gatto traced an inglorious history of “forced schooling”. Schools, he explained, continued the “elaborate system of social control” espoused by Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan, in which the 17th-century philosopher predicted that humans would descend into war unless they ceded rights to a protective sovereign authority.

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