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i'm currently working on an annotated web version of Gatto's book with roam style backlinks and all the cited sources directly embedded to make followup/verification easy im gonna launch a kickstarter soon to fund working on it. in the meantime here's why i'm excited about this! https://t.co/Ucr8NTlOzS
i highly recommend gatto's "the underground history of american education", it's the most straight talk exploration of how we got to now that i've seen, and it runs a good mix of conveying gestalts and overviews while leaving enough refs to primary sources for me to verify shit
basically, Gatto's book had the effect of moving me from, "wow, it's almost *AS IF* school was designed to teach obedience while making learning hard" to "oh... that was basically the original plan and generations of key players were v articulate about it... WTF"
i didn't previously get that anti-intellectualism was a thing, nor that it had well read articulate champions, nor that it already had become a/the mainstream educational force 100 years ago https://t.co/hdPaIUXkkc
the literacy stuff in particular, the adoption of the look-say method where you don't teach the alphabet and just have kids rote memorize words (while claiming it involves less memorization), sounded too dumb and fake to be real, but it actually happened! https://t.co/K5ZjMCB4Se
Gatto's book is a solid exposition, but the thing that really made an impact on me was following up on his quotes and sources. diving into primary sources is what 1) convinced me of the object level claims and 2) made me notice weird antimemetic fields i had around history
when i'd hit a WTF claim, i'd have a sinking feeling that it would Simply Be Too Hard To Investigate and get any conviction one way or another. i assumed massively implausible levels of unknowability, but kept digging and kept being surprised how well documented history is
like, i'd be reading about how american educators were influenced by what was going on in prussia and feel "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, but how could i even know what education in prussia was like???" wtf dude, maybe check the cited primary sources!!! https://t.co/IAGavpWDDW
yo, i'm reading "Address to the German Nation" by Fichte and it's creepy as fuck but it's filling in a confusion i had on how the actually earnest "love of learning" progressive edu types in 19th-20th century intermingled with the more authoritarian scientific management types
anywho, when i went searching for discourse around the book i didn't find much, mostly just homeschooling forums/blogs quoting verbatim, and goodreads amazong reviews either "holy shit, EYE OPENING" or "lol, angry christian conspiracy theorist"
i found 1 review that made a legit specific critique, and dozens more that would say weird shit like "as an edu historian, yeah sure he's mostly right about the history details, but Who Cares? This is Old News you Angry Old Man"
something that's almost a relevant critique, lots of people took the piss out of him for not citing sources. kiiinda true, he doesn't give formatted citations, though except for a few cases he always gives enough info to logically pinpoint the relevant source
however, plenty of documents were hard to find. and most required heavy use of internet archive. some aren't online at all, and are in some historical societies archive in massachusetts this gave the idea for the project of embedding digital copies of all sources in the book
and, though i'm still making a list of the sources, easily 80-90% or so of the documents he cites are public domain, so there's no reason to not make this whole thing a hyperlinked megabook like the internet was made for
my broad aim is to repackage gatto's book in a way that moves it from "forbidden esoteric knowledge" to "straightforward well documented historical claims you can verify easily for yourself" fuck ahistorical antimemes, the truth is out there 🔥
besides backlinking the whole book, embedding sources so you can follow quotes directly to their og context, and annotating with important corrections i find, i'm also going to write some blogposts to fill in the gaps i was curious about that gatto didn't address enough for me
i'm excited and nervous to crowd fund this cuz it will be the first time i'm asking people to pay me to make stuff i think they'll get a lot out of! it feels a bit less intimidating to kickstart a well scoped discrete project, than to generally make a patreon or something