Introduction After nearly 30 years in the public schools, John Taylor Gatto has quit his job as a schoolteacher to become one of the country's most articulate critics of American education. The author of Dumbing Us Down currently lives in New York City, where he is working on a book about the history of compulsory education called The Empty Child. Interview excerpts Prussia is the first state in human history to have a compulsory schooling law that works.
Nobody is dumb enough to keep going to school after a few days.
It collapses when the cops don't come after you. That's what happened to the famous New England compulsory school law. It was there as a piece of window dressing. But not in Prussia. They really were marched to school at bayonet point.