I found this essay in the Fall '91 issue of Whole Earth Review. It finally clarified for me why American school is such a spirit-crushing experience, and suggested what to do about it.
我在《全球评论》91年秋季卷中发现这篇论文。它终于为我澄清了，为什么美国中小学校是这样一种摧毁精神的体验，以及给出了应该如何做的建议。
Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as Horace Mann and Andrew Carnegie.
请抱着反讽的心理去阅读这篇文章。如果你发现自己倾向于如偏执狂一样排斥以下课程，你应该知道当前美国中小学校制度背后的设计，都非常清楚的由那些著名的砖家如满赫雷和嘉安笃，在愚笨的犬儒主义出版物中，记录在历史中。
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
教师六课
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
作者：盖托，1991年纽约州年度教师
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
请叫我盖老师。二十六年前，找不到事情可以做，我就试着当老师。我取得英语语言文学教师许可，但是我干的完全不是这么回事。我教的是小学，我也因此获奖。
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
教学意味着许多不同的事情，但是这六个课程对于从三流学校到重点学校，都是通行的。你会以远比你想像更多的途径为这六堂课付出代价，因此你可能想知道这六堂课到底是什么：
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
我所教的第一堂课是：“呆在你自己的班上。”我不知道谁决定了我的孩子们的归属，但这不关我的事。孩子们都被编了号，因此，如果有谁开溜，他们都能被送回自己的班上。多年以来，对孩子们进行编号的各类方式急剧增加，直到从每个孩子所携带的号码上面完全看不出一丝人的痕迹。给孩子们编号是一门很大很赚钱的行业，因此这个行业被故意弄成难以完成。
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
再一次，不管怎么样，这都跟我无关。我的任务是让孩子们喜欢上被人编号——要我说，就是被关在一起——或者至少，能忍受它。长此以往，孩子们无法想象自己身在别处会怎样；他们羡慕并害怕更好的班级，并侮辱更蠢的班级。因此，班级在很大程度上保持了自身在良好的行进顺序中的位置。这就是任何类似学校的装配竞赛所带来的真正课程。你需要了解你的环境。
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
虽然如此，不管整体蓝图如何，我都尽自己努力敦促孩子们通过更高层次的测试，希望最终能够脱离差班。我暗示这一天将会到来，当雇主根据他们的测试分数来雇用他们，哪怕我自己的经验是雇主（根本）不关心这些分数。我从未彻底撒谎，因为我已经看到真相和学校教学不相容。
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
从班级编号这一课学到的是，你的班级除非使用魔法，否则已没有出路。在它发生之前，你必须留在你所呆的地方。
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
我教给学生的第二课是，像一个电灯开关一样切换。我要求他们完全参与到我的课程当中来，如期在他们的座位上窜下跳，为了讨好我而精力十足的彼此竞争。但是当铃声响起，我命令他们应当立即放下手上的工作，并很快着手下一项工作。在我的班上没有什么是一定要完成的，我所知道的其他班上也是如此。
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
铃声这一课学到的是，没有什么工作是值得去完成的，那么，为什么要太在乎什么事情呢？铃声是学校作息的秘密法则；它们的理由是无可置疑的；铃声摧毁过去与将来，将两段铃声之间的间隔变得完全一样，就像一幅抽象地图，让每一条各不相同的山脉和河流都变得一样。铃声让人丧失对事业的热情。
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
我教给你的第三课，就是放弃你的意志，归属到一个命中注定的管理体系当中。当权者可以不经申诉的赋予或剥夺你的权利。作为一名教师，我介入过许多个人间的裁决，做出过我认为正当的宣判，也对那些威胁到我管理的行为实行过纪律惩戒。我的判决纷至沓来，因为在我的教室，学生不断彰显个性。个性，在所有分类系统中都是受到诅咒的，与班级理论相矛盾的。
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
它显示了这里有一些共性：孩子们以解大手为借口溜去厕所得到一点私人时间；他们以要喝水骗取一点在走廊的私人时间。有时候，孩子们因为一些超出我认识范围的事物而引起的愤怒、沮丧或欢喜，在我面前展示出自由意志的权利。这些权利，对于老师而言，并不存在；只有可以收回的特权，才能存在。
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
我所教的第四课，是只有我能决定你学哪些课程（更确切的说，我强制执行上头传达下来的决定）。这种权力让我立即区分好孩子和坏孩子。好孩子完全顺从地执行我委派的任务，并展现出相当的热情。由成千上万的东西的价值需要学习，我决定在哪样上投入多少时间。选择权在我这里。在我的工作中没有好奇心的位置，只有顺从。
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
当然，坏孩子对抗这个，试图公开或隐蔽的做出决定，决定他们自己该学什么。我们怎么能让这样的事情发生，那还是个人民教师么？幸好，有一套流程可以打消他们抵抗的企图。
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!
这是我教依赖这一课的另一个办法。好人等待教师告诉他们该做什么。这是最重要的一课，我们必须等待得到比我们更好训练的其他人，来指明我们生活的意义。毫不夸张地说，我们整个经济体制都依赖于我们所学的这一课程。想想，如果孩子们没有经受依赖课程的训练，什么会崩溃：社会服务行业会很难生存，包括快速增长的咨询行业；如果人们记得如何自得其乐的话，所有类型的商业娱乐业，连同电视一起，都会萎缩；如果人们回到厨房自己做饭，而不是依赖陌生人为他们做饭，餐饮服务业，餐厅和食品加工企业都会缩小。大部分的现代法律、医药和工程也都会消失——也包括服装行业——要不是为了保证供应每年从我们学校倾倒出去的无用之人的话。我们已经建立起了一种生活模式，依赖于人们去做被告知的事情，因为他们不知道任何其它生活模式。天呐，我们不要捣乱了。
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
我教的第五课，就是你的自尊取决于观察者对你价值的测量。我的孩子们常常受到评估和判定。每月一份精确到令人吃惊的报告，被寄往学生家里，详细记载认同或者精确标出——精确到百分位——他们孩子的家长应该有多不满。虽然有些人可能会惊讶于完成这些记录以及目标的日积月累需要多少时间或者反思，似乎通过文档就可以建立起对缺点的概括，并基于第三者的偶然判断，强制孩子得出一个关于他自己及其未来的必然结论。
Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
自我评价——出现在这个星球上的每一套重大哲学体系的主要内容——永远都不是学校事物的组成因素。这一刻就是，报告卡、等级分和考试，孩子们可以不相信他们自己或者他们的父母，但必须依赖于政府认可的评价方式。人们需要被告知自己的价值所在。
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
我给孩子们教的第六课，就是他们正在被人观察。我时时刻刻监管每一个学生，我的同事也是如此。学生没有私人空间，也没有私人时间。班级改变最后300秒，保持最低程度的随意交往。鼓励学生谈论其他学生的闲话，甚至包括他们父母的闲话。当然，我也鼓励父母锉平他们孩子的任性。
I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.
我布置家庭作业，这样监管就能延伸到家庭。否则，在家里学生们有可能有时间学习一些未经许可的东西，有可能是跟父母，也有可能是跟着某些聪明的邻居当学徒。
The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.
从时刻监管这一课学到的是，没有人值得信任，隐私是非法的。监管在某些有影响的思想中当中，自古就有其紧迫性。这是卡尔文在其研究所，柏拉图在其理想国，霍布斯、孔德、培根制定的核心规定。所有这些没有孩子的男人都发现了同样的事情：如果你想保持一个处在中央控制之下的社会，孩子们必须被密切注视。
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
这是学校教育的伟大胜利，这当中甚至有最好的教师，有最好的家长，这里只有一小撮人能够想到以不同的方式去做事情。然而，在美国，只有极少数人以前的事情是不同的：原创性和变化性曾经流行，严格控制下的自由曾经让我们成为世界的奇迹，社会阶层的界线曾经相对容易跨越，我们的公民曾经奇迹般的自信、富有发明，能够独立完成很多事情，自主思考。我们曾经，作为个体，一切自主。
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
只要花大约五十个课时，就可以把基本的识字和数学技能教得足够好，让孩子们接下来能够自学。呼吁练习基本技能的，是学校为了抢占孩子们十二年的时间，并教会他们我刚才教的六门课程，而放的烟雾弹。
We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
在美国，自从内战开始之前，我们的社会就日益受到中央控制：我们过的日子、穿的衣物、吃的食物，以及驱动我们从一个出口到另一个出口行进的绿色高速路标，都是中央控制的产品。因此，我也想，毒品、自杀、离婚、暴力、虐待的流行，以及美国的阶级僵化成种姓制度，我们生活中非人化的产品，个性和家庭的重要性的减弱，这一切都是中央控制造成的。
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
在社会生活中如果没有一个十分积极的任务，你不可能发展成为一个完美的人。亚里斯多德这样教导我们。他肯定是对的。看看你的周围，或者看看你自己：这就是一个例子。
"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
一座宣称绝大多数人都是其基石的金字塔，向上收缩到一个控制点，对于这样一个社会工程景象而言，“学校”是一项必要的支持系统。“学校”是一种手段，可以让这样一种金字塔社会秩序成为必然（虽然这样的一个前提，是对美国革命的彻底背叛）。在殖民时代，以及共和国初期，我们没有学校可言，然而民主的承诺已经开始得到实现。我们拒绝支持这份承诺，而去唤醒古老的埃及梦想：将每个人强制训练成仆从。义务教育是柏拉图在其理想国中制订完全控制人的生活的计划时，勉强透露出来的秘密。
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.
当前对于是否我们需要一份国家课程的争论是个伪命题：我们已经有了，就是我告诉你的这六课，以及几样我没有告诉你的。该课程造成道德和智力丧失，并且没有什么课程的内容能够纠正它的负面影响。这跟下面的讨论完全无关。
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.
你知道的，没有什么是必然的。没有什么是永恒不变的。我们在培养年轻人的时候做出选择，怎么选都没有正确的道路。没有“国际竞争”在逼迫我们的生存，相反，在媒体神话连续不断的轰炸下，我们甚至连思考都很困难。在非常重要的原材料方面，我们国家做到自给自足。如果我们得到一种非物质的哲学，发现意义的真实所在——家庭、朋友、四季的变迁、自然、简单的仪式、好奇心、慷慨、怜悯、为他人服务，适当的独立与隐私——这样我们才真正自给自足。
How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.
在“学校”，这个可怕的地方，是怎么做的？正如我们所知，他们是1848和1919两个“红色恐惧”的产物，当强大的利益害怕工业穷人的革命，并且在一定程度上是因为从1845年后，保守家庭厌恶凯尔特、斯拉夫和拉丁，以及天主教派的移民潮。肯定能找到第三个原因，同样这些家庭在内战之后厌恶黑人在社会上自由流动。
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.
再来看这学校的六门课程。这是训练底层阶层永远处在底层，人们被永远夺去发现自己特殊才能的能力。这也是训练从原有的逻辑中松脱出来：以便统治穷人。自从1920年代以来，口齿伶俐的学校官僚的增加，企业工人的不明显增长，这就是从学校教育中获得利益的真相，扩大学校教育最初的权力，抓住中产阶层的子女。
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.
苏格拉底受到粗暴控诉他花钱教书，还有什么惊奇的么？就算这样，哲学家们清楚地看到，教学专业化的必然方向，将会抢占健康社区所属的教学功能；属于，的确，你自己最清楚了，因为没有人比你更关心你的命运了。专业化教学倾向于另一重大错误。这天然地让易于学习的东西，如阅读、写作和算数，变得困难——通过强调他们是按照教学法流程来教学的。
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
我日复一日得教着类似的课程，我们对于今日所面对的民族危机还会感到奇怪么？年轻人对成人世界和未来漠不关心；对暴力和游戏以外的几乎所有事情都漠不关心？无论富有或贫穷，小学生都不能长时间集中注意力。他们缺乏对于时间过往的感受；他们不信任亲密（离异子女就是如此）；他们憎恨孤独，当遭遇意外时，他们残忍、物质、依赖、消极、暴力、胆怯，他们沉迷于娱乐。
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
所有这些幼年时代的边缘性向，都被学校教育扩大到荒谬的程度，其隐性课程有效防止个性发展。事实上，如果没有利用孩子们的恐惧、自私和无知，我们的学校根本无法生存，我也不能成为已经认证教师。
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
“批判性思维”是近来我们经常听到的一个词，作为一种训练形式，它预示着群众学校教育的新时代。它一定能实现——只要真的去开始做的话。在去年一年里，没有哪所公立学校真的敢在不肢解的情况下，就教辩证法、启发式教学和其他自由思想工具的使用。
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
体制内的教师会破坏孩子们的发展。没人能够毫发无损的经历这六课课程，教师也是如此。该方法是深度的反教育。修修补补是不能解决问题的了。在对人类活动的绝妙反讽中，大量反思，学校所需要的花费远少于我们今天实际支出的，以至于似乎不大可能发生。首当其冲的，我在一个工作展示和承包租借的单位工作。我们不能只努力挣钱，而不去帮助孩子们。
At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
在我们经过的历史上，在经过26年的教育生涯，我必须做出结论，对于绝大多数家庭，即将发生的唯一变化就是，在家里教他们自己的孩子。此外就是小型的私立学校。某些采用自由市场体制的公共学校教育场所是最有可能找到答案的地方。但是对于贫困破裂家庭而言，这都几乎不可能实现，对于太多处在中产阶层边缘的家庭来说，这预示着六课程学校的灾害很可能会继续。
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
在将自己成年以后的生命都花在学校教学之后，我相信，学校教育的方法是它唯一真实拥有的。不要被欺骗，认为好的课程或者好的设备或者好的教师，是你子女所在学校的关键决定因素。所有我们考虑过的症状都会在很大程度上发生，因为学校的课程将孩子们与他们自身及其家庭隔离开来，阻止他们学习自我激励、毅力、自力更生、勇气、尊严和爱的课程——当然，还有为他人服务的课程，这都是家庭生活的关键课程。
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
三十年前，这些东西在课余时间仍能学到。但是电视吞噬掉了绝大部分课余时间，并且电视和压力的综合问题为双职工或单亲家庭所特有，吞噬了绝大部分家庭时间。我们的孩子没有时间成为一个完全的人，他们只是一片薄土荒地。
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
未来冲着我们的文化奔腾而来，我们的文化将坚持我们所有人学习非物质经验的智慧；这是未来的需求，生存的代价，我们跟随自然生命经济的原料成本的步伐。这些课程在学校无法如期学到。学校，就像度过十二年徒刑，坏习惯是唯一能真实学到的课程。我教书，并为此获奖。我应该知道。
A 1997 interview on We The People radio has been transcribed here.
一份1997年我们是人民电台的访谈笔录在此。
[The following is from a letter by Grace Llewellyn (author of the Teenage Liberation Handbook), printed in the Spring 1992 issue of the Whole Earth Review:]
以下来自格雷斯的信件（《青少年解放手册》的作者），刊印于《全球评论》1992年春季卷。
.. Gatto has a new job. Having resigned, he continues to implement his unique "guerilla curriculum" at the Albany Free School, and also lectures nationwide. In his lectures and his writing Gatto not only adeptly denounces the public schools, but also makes radical suggestions for improving them. These suggestions are grounded not in hypothetical clouds but rather on his own innovative methods of teaching which involve community service projects, independent study, apprenticeships, and solitude. ... More of Gatto's writing can be found in a new collection of his essays entitled "Dumbing Us Down" (New Society Publishers, 1992) [excerpted in WER issue #81].
……盖托有了一份新工作。辞职以后，他继续在奥尔巴尼自由小学推行他独特的“游击队课程”，同时也在全国巡回演讲。在他的演讲和文章中，他不仅熟练的攻击公立学校，也为其改进提出根本性的建议。这些建议是脚踏实地而非空中楼阁，只是都基于他自己创造的教学方法，其中涉及社区服务项目、自主学习、学徒式教学和独居……可以在题为《愚民》的盖托论文集中找到更多文章（新社会出版社，1992年）。【引自《世界教育资源》81年卷】
"Dumbing Us Down" is available from New Society Publishers (POB 189, Gabriola Island, BC, V0R 1X0 CANADA), or via Gatto's own online bookstore, or from your friendly neighborhood bookstore (ISBN 0-86571-448-7).
《愚民》可以通过新社会出版社（通讯地址：POB 189, Gabriola Island, BC, V0R 1X0 CANADA）获得，或者通过盖托自己的在线书店，或者从你附近的书店（ISBN 0-86571-448-7）。
A more comprehensive book, newly available on-line as well as in print is "The Underground History of American Education", and may be found at John Taylor Gatto's own web site, johntaylorgatto.com. You can buy a copy via his online bookstore, or from your friendly neighborhood bookstore (ISBN 0-945-70004-0). (Note: I have no financial relationship with him or the publisher.)
最近提供一本更全面的书，《美国教育隐史》，同时提供在线版本和纸质版本，可以在盖托自己的网站找到。你也可以通过他的在线书店或者你附近的书店（ISBN 0-945-70004-0）购买一本。（注意：我跟他或者出版商没有任何财务关系。）
Harper's September 2003 issue had an essay, "Against School".
哈珀2003年九月卷上有一篇文章《抵制学校》。
If you maintain a web page, you are encouraged to add a link to this one, as a short introduction to the problem of school. This page will be stable forever.
如果你维护一份网页，希望你能添加一条本文的链接，以及对学校问题的简短介绍。此网页永远存在。
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