
This is a big thing I think Gatto misses: the elites did not successfully protect their own children from the bad pedagogical practices that were being pushed in public schools. Though I haven't been able to find anything remotely resembling comprehensive statistics, it seems like expensive private schools across the country adopted whole-language based reading instruction at similar frequencies to public schools. Now, richer families do have more access to private tutoring, but their actual schooling institutions have also been poisoned and there doesn't seem to be common knowledge about that. And of course there's the fact that kids at the Ivy League's can't read books, largely because they never had to read them in high-school, something prevalent at both fancy prep schools and public high-schools.