By Rich Fisher
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kwgs/local-kwgs-842505.mp3
Tulsa, Oklahoma – (Note: This program originally aired earlier this year.) On today's program, we speak with John Taylor Gatto --- a sharp, articulate, outspoken, and even radical critic of compulsory schooling in America today. His ideas have irked (and continue to irk) many, admittedly, but they have also brought to light various contradictions, shortcomings, and unfair practices in American public education. Gatto was an award-winning, and long-serving, New York City schoolteacher when he quit the classroom in 1991 --- he was in his mid-fifties at the time --- by running an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled "I Quit, I Think." Since then, he has written several books on the history and purpose, as well as the development and decline, of schooling in America. These include "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" (1992), "The Exhausted School" (1993), "A Different Kind of Teacher" (2000), and "The Underground History of American Education" (2001). School-reform advocate and education critic John Taylor Gatto joins our host Rich Fisher today to discuss his latest book, just out from New Society Publishers: "Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling."