Weapons of Mass Instruction

John Taylor Gatto, who taught in public schools for thirty years, argues that compulsory schooling stunts imagination and critical thinking and teaches children to see learning as rote memorization. In his view the harm is deliberate: the real purpose of mass education is to make the population manageable. Students are conditioned to rely on experts, kept apart from natural allies, cut off from their own experience and steered away from self-reliance. Against this Gatto proposes what he calls open source learning, which draws no artificial line between learning and life. The book follows his Dumbing Us Down, and Gatto quit teaching with a Wall Street Journal op-ed in the year he was named New York's Teacher of the Year.

Seth Godin said he recommends it to parents again and again and that it changes how they see school.