Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I would have given this book 5 stars for all of the little-known facts Gatto unearths about the history of education. Industrialists, religious fanatics, eugenicists, and various kinds of psychologists are all shown to have worked their agendas into the American public school system. But I can't give this book 5 stars, because it also reads like a conspiracy theory. It's poorly organized and tends to draw sweeping conclusions based on quotations, events, or facts taken out of context. And since Gatto doesn't generally cite his sources in detail, it's hard to track down the context. He has a clear agenda (and, for the most part, a noble one), but that doesn't mean he's allowed to exaggerate or present misleading -- and sometimes incorrect -- facts with few sources given. Particularly when you're making huge claims that most historians have neglected, you need to provide sources. That's the difference between revising history and presenting your own conspiracy theory version of history. Unfortunately, Gatto falls into the latter. While I believe a lot of what this book says, some of it didn't make sense to me, so I started researching some of Gatto's claims. Generally, he gets things mostly right, but he often misrepresents their significance or juxtaposes them with other things inappropriately to make them fit into his narrative of hatred against the school system. And sometimes what he says is simply wrong. Since this is a brief review, let me just give one example -- illiteracy. Gatto claims that the registrants tested in the WWII draft had only a 4% illiteracy rate. He claims that in Korea, that had risen to 18% illiterate -- Gatto claims this caused the military to call in psychologists to figure out how people were "faking" illiteracy, since they couldn't believe the drop. By Vietnam, the number had risen to 27% illiterate. Yet he says in 1840 that literacy was 93-100% in the U.S. "wherever such a thing mattered." The inference we're supposed to draw is clearly that compulsory public schools (which weren't instituted anywhere until the 1850s) affected literacy negatively. But, for some reason Gatto doesn't explain, these awful schools somehow managed to retain a high literacy rate until WWII. Why the sudden drop? Well, Gatto is getting prepared for a diatribe against whole-word reading education instead of phonics, and that was widely adopted in the mid-20th century. There are loads of errors in even this small passage. Apparently "wherever such a thing mattered" in 1840 is code for "Northern white male." Overall literacy rates actually varied from 81% to 99% across both the North and South at that time, but note this is based on self-reporting in census data -- the same source of data that claims a 99% literacy rate currently in the U.S., a figure which Gatto rightly derides as inaccurate. Historians have demonstrated that literacy was probably pretty high (90% or so) in 1840 among free males in the U.S. by analyzing other data (and maybe 80% or even higher for females), but Gatto is being selective in choosing what to report. But let's move on to the draft. Just a few paragraphs later, we learn that literacy in 1940 was 96% for white, 80% for blacks. What happened to the 96% rate for the entire WWII draft we just heard about? Well, apparently, that was only for whites -- he just didn't mention it. Whereas the Korea figures seem to be for all recruits. But it makes it easier to see the trend from 4% to 18% to 27% illiteracy if you select the data dishonestly. Actually, despite Gatto's claim that the Korean War was when the military became concerned about illiteracy, it was a much greater problem in WWII since more men were needed. In 1940, almost 400,000 men who registered in the first draft registration signed their names with only a mark. They were not only illiterate; they couldn't even write their own name. By 1941, the Army had inducted so many illiterates that they didn't know what to do with them -- so they raised the standard to a 4th-grade education. Note that they weren't tested at first for literacy; they were just presumed literate with a 4th-grade education. (This "test" is presumably where Gatto gets his figures, not from actual literacy tests.) But too many recruits were being turned away, so they relaxed the standard and allowed 5-10% of recruits to be illiterate as long as they were deemed to have the capacity to learn. What followed was a massive intense educational campaign where the military tried (and usually succeeded) in teaching WWII soldiers basic skills including reading. 10-15% of those who passed the initial qualifications were forced to take those reading classes, which means that 5-10% of recruits with a 4th-grade education were illiterate, and the rest were admitted under the illiterate quota with the capacity to learn. Looking over all the figures, overall illiteracy in the draft pool (which was never explicitly tested per se) was probably 15-20%. And since the majority of the draft pool was white, the higher illiteracy rate for blacks that Gatto quotes doesn't explain this. Gatto sweeps under the rug this massive literacy campaign in the military, requiring thousands of teachers to teach hundreds of thousands of troops how to read. There was no massive drop in literacy between WWII and Korea -- it went from about 15-20% to 18%. Moreover, he outright falsifies the number for the Vietnam draft, as far as I can tell. The best information I could find puts illiteracy at 17% in the Vietnam draft pool. Perhaps Gatto is adding in other exemptions for other mental deficiencies (some of which may include illiteracy), but he doesn't cite his sources, so we don't know. But wait -- there's more. What about the WWI draft? Gatto never mentions it. But 7% of registrants signed their name with a mark for the WWI draft, almost twice the percentage of the WWII draft. Registrants in WWI were given IQ tests, either "alpha" if literate or "beta" if basically illiterate. About 1/3 of registrants were given the beta test, and estimates of literacy based on scores in the draft pool concluded that about 20-25% of registrants were illiterate. Following that news, again there were mass literacy campaigns because the public was outraged at how high illiteracy was. It appears that better schooling apparently did improve public literacy at least by a few percentage points by WWII. Contrary to Gatto's claim, therefore, illiteracy didn't get significantly worse over the 20th century. At WWI, it was 20-25%, at WWII, it was 15-20%, during Korea, 18%, Vietnam, 17%, and according to recent national studies in the 1990s that Gatto even cites (which were much more thorough at classifying illiteracy than the earlier tests) put illiteracy at 21-23%. Of course, when Gatto cites that last study, he exaggerates the claims to make it sound like only 3.5% have complete literacy. That may be true for advanced (post college-level) literacy, but all the draft statistics put the bar around 4th or 5th grade level, which the 1990s study says makes about 21-23% functionally illiterate. (And since this study used a different test than the military standards, we can't actually compare the numbers, so we don't know if literacy has actually changed.) In sum, literacy has stayed roughly the same over the 20th century. Perhaps it went up and down slightly, but mostly it has just hovered around 20%. That in itself is an indictment of public schooling, but it apparently wasn't strong enough to make Gatto's point that whole-word reading produced a spectacular number of illiterates. So, he rigged the figures. (I'm not a fan of whole-word reading by the way, either, but I'm not going to make up or misrepresent numbers to try to convince you of my opinion.) And those are just errors I could find within a couple pages. I've uncovered half a dozen other examples of misleading claims like this, but finding this stuff out takes quite a bit of research, so I've stopped bothering. But I think anyone who reads this should ask themselves how they feel about the ethics of someone who admits that he isn't going to cite his sources and then obviously chooses to deliberately manipulate evidence in such a way as to produce misleading results that support his own agenda. It's sort of like Fox News or a Michael Moore documentary. He brings up a lot of good points, but unfortunately I no longer know how much to trust, and how much is just his dishonest rigging of history. That said, I recommend that you read this book, because it does provide a unique perspective that has a lot of insight. But I can't give it a good rating, because I no longer trust anything he has said unless I've looked it up myself. And, in a way, I think this makes Gatto not only unethical but a bit hypocritical, since he claims that public schools hide behind their public face and public goals while masking all the hidden agendas going on behind the scenes. And yet, when he claims to be educating us, he doesn't hesitate to do the same thing when it serves his own aims.