How I Tried John Taylor Gatto’s Teaching Methods in My Own Classroom
The interruption came on a Tuesday, about twenty minutes into a worksheet on supply and demand. Marcus, a usually quiet seventh grader, raised his hand and said, “Why are we learning this? My uncle owns a car shop and he just tells his customers the price. He doesn’t use charts.”
A few kids snickered. Another student whispered, “Yeah, this is pointless.” In the past, I would have given my standard speech about how economics connects to everyday life, how the skill of analyzing markets would help them later. But I’d been reading John Taylor Gatto’s essays the week before, and for the first time, I didn’t answer. I just said, “That’s a fair question. Let’s put the worksheet down and think about it.”
For the next fifteen minutes, the class talked about Marcus’s uncle, about how pricing works in small shops versus big stores, and whether anyone actually needed to know the term “equilibrium.” It was messy, slightly chaotic, and the most engaged they’d been all month. That was the start of my tentative experiment with what is now loosely known as Gatto’s teaching philosophy.
John Taylor Gatto taught for thirty years and then wrote a series of books and speeches arguing that compulsory schooling often harms more than it helps. He claimed that traditional classrooms teach children to be willing to follow orders, to be passive, and to depend on external rewards like grades rather than internal curiosity. A lot of that sounds anti-school, and in some ways it is. But as I learned, his methods aren’t about abandoning teaching altogether. They’re about shifting the source of motivation.
The first thing I stopped doing was leading every lesson with a definition or an objective. Gatto often pointed out that authentic learning begins with a problem that feels real to the learner. So instead of writing “Understand the water cycle” on the board, I started my next science class by asking, “What actually happens to the puddle outside after it rains?” The kids gave me quick answers like “it evaporates” but when I pushed them to explain how, they admitted they’d memorized the word but couldn’t describe the process. That gap between knowing a term and understanding a system gave us a reason to dig deeper. I didn’t call it a lesson on evaporation; I called it a mystery we needed to solve.
One practical adjustment came from Gatto’s emphasis on allowing students to teach each other. He argued that when you force a child to sit in a chair for six hours listening to an adult, you train them to depend on authority. So I began to use a simple structure: after introducing a topic, I would pair students up and ask one to explain it to the other as if they were the teacher. The rule was that they couldn’t just read from the textbook; they had to use an example from their own life. Maya explained photosynthesis by comparing it to how her mother’s plants sit by the window. Jordan compared the American Revolution to a group of friends who finally got tired of a bossy kid taking all the snacks. The explanations weren’t always perfect, but they were theirs. And that ownership made the information stick far better than my neatly planned slides.
Gatto also believed in giving children more unstructured time, a controversial idea in this era of packed schedules and standardized tests. I couldn’t change the school calendar, but I did start allocating one period per week to something I called “curiosity time.” Students could pick any question they had about the world and research it in whatever way they wanted, using books, videos, or even by interviewing staff members. One girl spent four weeks investigating why her favorite sneakers were so expensive, tracing the supply chain from factory to store. A boy interviewed the school janitor about the most efficient way to clean an entire building. Nothing I did in my official curriculum produced as much genuine problem-solving as those free-form afternoons.
The hardest part was handling silence. In my original teacher training, I was told to keep a smooth pace, to avoid long pauses. But Gatto wrote about the importance of leaving space for kids to wrestle with doubt. The first time I asked a question and then waited twelve seconds without rephrasing it, the students looked at me like I had broken. A few squirmed. But then one shy girl raised her hand and said something completely unexpected. That silence was not a failure; it was a sign that I had stopped doing the thinking for them. Now I use a timer on my phone, silently counting to twenty, before offering any hints.
Gatto wasn’t just about tactics though. He challenged the entire premise of age-based groupings, arguing that kids learn better in mixed-age communities where older children mentor younger ones. I can’t redesign the school system, but I can borrow that concept. I partnered my seventh graders with a second-grade classroom for a monthly reading project. My students were nervous at first. But something interesting happened: They had to explain concepts like plot and character in simple words, and that forced them to understand those ideas more deeply themselves. The younger kids responded not to a teacher’s authority but to the slightly older kid who was clearly figuring it out in real time. That peer-to-peer energy is something no worksheet could ever replicate.
Of course, not everything went smoothly. My experiment produced a lot of uncertainty. During the causation lesson, one student told me, “It’s easier when you just tell us the answer.” Another parent complained that she couldn’t help her son with his homework because the assignments didn’t have clear right or wrong answers anymore. I had to explain that the goal wasn’t to make things harder, but to make them more real. Gatto would have said that parental anxiety is part of the problem, but I’ve learned to be more diplomatic.
I’ve also had to reconcile his ideas with my reality. I still give tests, because the district requires them. I still use textbooks, because they’re free and available. But I’ve changed the order of operations. Instead of “read the chapter and answer questions,” we now start with a question, then use the chapter to check our own guesses. I bring in articles from newspapers, local business menus, even gravestones with dates and symbols to teach history. The gravestone assignment came from Gatto’s belief that history is better learned through artifacts than timeline charts. My students calculated how many people in that small cemetery died during a cholera outbreak, and they haven’t stopped talking about it since.
What remains uncertain is whether this approach works for every child. Some kids genuinely thrive on structure, and I still provide plenty of it. Gatto might say that’s a risk, but I’ve learned that ideals and classroom realities exist in constant tension. I don’t fully agree with him that compulsory schooling is always harmful. There are days when I revert to the old methods out of convenience or exhaustion. But the Marcus question was a turning point. Now, when a student asks why they need to learn something, I don’t have a scripted answer. I stop, listen, and often ask them what they think. That must have been what Gatto meant when he said that education should be about discovering what’s out there, not just absorbing what’s in front of you.
I still worry about test scores and curriculum deadlines. But I’ve started to notice something odd: when I give up a little control, the students take on more responsibility. Last week, Marcus told me that his uncle actually does use math to set prices, only he does it in his head. Marcus had gone home and asked, because our class discussion made him curious enough to pursue it. We never finished the worksheet. I don’t think we ever will.
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