The Open History of American Education

Foreword

You don't need a history book to tell you there's a problem with schools, but you might need a history book to understand how we got into this mess.

"Why are we forced to go to school?" is a question every child asks. Most stop asking it when they realize no one can provide them with a real answer. Whenever I've asked people this question, the responses have invariably been canned and hollow.

"To learn!" Empirically, not a lot of learning happens in schools. To the degree learning does happen, there's no reason to believe that schools have a monopoly on it, and even in the world where schools are uniformly great and are one of the few ways for kids to learn, that could only ever be an argument for free publicly funded education, not an argument for why you should go to jail if you don't give your kids to the school system. "To keep kids out of the factories!" If that was really anyone's goal why would child-labor laws not be enough? Even the most "cynical" reason I sometimes hear, "of course school isn't about learning, but its load-bearing free day care for the overworked underclasses" utterly fails to address why this supposedly load-bearing infrastructure requires the backing of government force to continue functioning.

Not only are these justifications flimsy and half-baked, they are all ahistorical. John Gatto's work attempts to actually answer this question. What he makes clear in this book is that there have never been liberal (as in Liberty) reasons for compulsory schooling. From the start, mass schooling was seen as a vehicle for social engineering, created by people who thought of children as an enemy populace that needed to be subdued, and as blank-slate resources to be mined. At no point in the intervening century since its creation have these ideas stopped being the basic assumptions of schooling. All that's changed is that our institutions have undergone collective amnesia and memory-holed their origins, leaving current generations lamenting a "broken" system while having already normalized its most destructive premises.

School does real damage to people, regardless of how well they perform in the system. Kids who do well frequently get addicted to external approval and learn to treat everything as an Opportunity To Fail. Kids who do worse frequently get traumatized out of their natural ability to learn, leaving them vastly worse off than they would have been and on the path to becoming Problem People who will be further abused by the system.

Even the most humane schools consist of a constant stream of senseless violations of your personal autonomy. Whether or not the academics are good and whether or not the teachers are kind, the implicit curriculum of most schools is the same: it does not matter if what we're doing here makes sense, and you will get in trouble if you keep bringing it to our attention; you have no recourse; your body and your time are not your own; you will be rewarded for passing tests and not for understanding. Nothing you do here is real.

But why does history matter for coming to terms with the concerns of the present? Well, in my case, despite the fact that I've had plenty of opportunities to notice the subtle and overt ways school crushes people (as born out by my own experience and the experience of most people I've talked to about the matter), there's always been this foggy air of irreality about it all. Surely I didn't get huge swathes of my child-hood wasted because that's just how things work? Surely we couldn't be doing this to millions of children every year? Surely it must all be some delirious dream I had…

You see, I suffer from a strange affliction, which I see in most of my peers, where I have difficulty explicitly acknowledging and integrating information about conflicts I'm in when counter-parties in the conflict deny that any conflict exists. While I've always been able to implicitly recognize that school was not my friend, the ambient gaslighting was strong enough that I never managed to put it into words that I could stand by. Understanding history changed that. The clarity that the historical record provides about the explicit antagonism between schooling and children was vivid and startling enough to shake me out of my compartmentalization. It now feels possible to integrate into my worldview that school damages, and orient to important questions like "how do I keep my loved ones safe?" Though I wish I hadn't needed that extra shove, that's what did it for me, and I want to share this experience with others.

Learning about the history helped me denormalize compulsory schooling and notice that it's neither natural nor inevitable. Specific people with specific, coherent, illiberal agendas put in work to make it so. It could have been otherwise and it can be otherwise. Unless people can question why schooling is compulsory, the best reformers will ever do is make the totally illiberal child prisons more humane.

What you are about to read is my annotated edition of Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education". In some of my footnotes I expand on his claims, in others I argue with them, and in general I’ve tried to only add things that enhance the usefulness of this as a resource for others. Additionally, I’ve tracked down all of the book's sources and hyperlinked them into the contexts where they are referenced. All of his sources, as well as some other useful works I’ve found while researching, are available for your perusal on the Library page. My aim for this website is not only to boost Gatto’s work, but to make it as easy as possible for all who are curious to dive into the historical record for themselves.

As of Sept 2025, I've decided to release this chapter by chapter, instead of waiting till I finish the footnotes for the entire thing. For anyone who wants to read ahead at their own pace, you can find a PDF of Gattos' original work here.To recieve email updates when new chapters are released, sign up here.

I've taken the liberty of changing the title of this edition from "The Underground History of American Education" to "The Open History of American Education". This is a nod to the Open-Access nature of making the underlying historical record accessible, but it also points to a deeper sentiment. When reading a history book that self-describes as "underground", you might reasonably wonder what exactly makes it "underground". Is there some canonical narrative that it runs counter to? Did the author hunt through obscure archives to find the previously unknown paper trail of a massive coverup? Are they doing weapons-grade Straussian readings of otherwise innocuous sources? Surely if this history is so damning it must have taken an extraordinary effort to unearth?

Well... not really. Though Gatto did good research that I'm grateful for, very little of what he builds his case on is fringe or newly discovered. Most of it comes from reputable sources anyone can find if they have a library card and internet access. Somehow it manages to be the case that information which is 1) publicly available, 2) well documented, 3) relevant to people's lives, and 4) not technically suppressed, still fails to gain a foothold in collective awareness, and this isn't just a problem for the history of education, it's a bizarrely recurring pattern across many domains and it threatens the integrity of our civilization.

In the face of such persistent collective amnesia, I think it's common to begin to treat the subject of the amnesia as "forbidden knowledge" which can only be whispered about in select circles. Unfortunately such attitudes only make it harder to bootstrap new healthy discourse. I'm calling this edition of Gattos' book an open history because I want readers to approach this as normal discourse, not underground esoterica. The claims in this book are meant to be built on, critiqued, and shared. Hopefully this website makes such discourse even easier.

—Hazard Spence, August 2025