Fact Checking Services

Quote from the Text
“In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure: ‘We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.’”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 59

Fact Check
While Wilson did make this statement, he said it about three-quarters of the way through a 6300-word speech to a group of high school teachers. Multiple sources identify the speech as one given on January 9, 1909 to the mixed-gender group, New York City High School Teachers Association.

Quote from the Text
“The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 35

Fact Check
Even if we assume Plato’s writing included the first known evidence of someone advocating for mass public schools, it’s difficult to claim that one person invented an idea.

Quote from the Text
“Finally in 1918, sixty-six years after the Massachusetts force legislation, the forty-eighth state, Mississippi, enacted a compulsory school attendance law.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 128

Fact Check
It’s unclear where Gatto got the date of 1918. In 1878, the state constitution was updated to include a clause about compulsory education noting that, “the schools in each county shall be so arranged as to offer ample free school facilities to all educable youths in that county but white and colored children shall not be taught in the same school-house, but in separate school-houses.”

From Bolton, C. C., The hardest deal of all: The battle over school integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980, 2005.

Quote from the Text
Gatto attributes the following quotes from William Torrey Harris’ Philosophy of Education (1906).

1. ‘Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.’

2. ‘The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.’”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 132

Fact Check
The first quote appears to be a truncated, modified version of a quote from Harris’ 1893 lecture at Johns Hopkins.

1. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in every civilized nation are automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow prescribed custom. This is the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual under his species.”

2. This quote cannot be found in Harris' 1893 lectures and the Philosophy of Education book from 1906 associated with Harris was a series of essays where he acted as editor, not author. The quote does not appear in that text.

Quote from the Text
“Between 1840 and 1860, male schoolteachers were cleansed from the Massachusetts system and replaced by women. A variety of methods was used, including the novel one of paying women slightly more than men in order to bring shame into play in chasing men out of the business.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 153

Fact Check
Salary tables for teachers across New England in the 1850s show that male teachers were consistently paid more than women teachers, sometimes up to three times as much. If Gatto had evidence of a school that deliberately paid men more, it’s a school that appears to have escaped the attention of historians who study the feminization of the profession.

Quote from the Text
“Children were instructed indirectly that there was no grief; indeed, an examination of hundreds of those books from the transitional period between 1900 and 1916 reveals that Evil no longer had any reality either.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 154

Fact Check
A clear example of a children’s book that deals with grief and evil from that period is L. Frank Baum’s The Emerald City of Oz (1914.) The book focuses on the actions of the Nome King Roquat who seeks out evil spirits to help conquer the Land of Oz. There are numerous others.

Quote from the Text
“If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, Page 162

Fact Check
Gatto’s use of this statistic is misleading. The Swiss high school structure offers multiple tracts for students. About a quarter of students elect to follow an academic track and about three-quarters participate in a combination of academics and vocational training or apprenticeships but most virtually all young people pursue commencement level education. There are additional demarcations within different programs, based on where a student lives and what they’re studying.

Quote from the Text
“Even thirty years after Waterloo, so highly was Prussia regarded in America and Britain, the English-speaking adversaries selected the Prussian king to arbitrate our northwest border with Canada. Hence the Pennsylvania town ‘King of Prussia.’”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, Page 163

Fact Check
According to the King of Prussia Historical Association, the city was named for a prominent inn located in the area. It’s believed the inn was built in 1709 and named by the Prussian proprietor for the recently crowned king, Frederick I. The battle of Waterloo was in 1815.

Quote from the Text
“Prussia itself was a curious place, not an ordinary country unless you consider ordinary a land which by 1776 required women to register each onset of their monthly menses with the police.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 164

Fact Check
Gatto does not provide a citation or any reference for this rather unusual detail so it's difficult to fact check. A review of other texts cited by Gatto offers no reference to such a structure, nor does it appear in reports from other Americas who traveled to Prussia during the same era.

Quote from the Text
“The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes… The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly…”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 167

Fact Check
Gatto appears to be the only author using Akadamiensschulen to describe Prussian schools in the 1800s. First, the correct spelling would be Akademienschulen. Second, there are multiple first-hand reports from Americans who traveled to Prussia and none use the term. Instead, they typically referenced Hauptschule, Realschule (note that Gatto misspelled the word in his book), and Gymnasium.

Quote from the Text
“The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators—nothing less than ‘impersonal manipulation’ through schooling of a future America in which "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which ‘each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number’ which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that ‘chemical experimentation’ on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced schooling.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 62

Fact Check
The phrases that Gatto quotes are in fact in the 1967 document, U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042, primarily on page 288. Rather than an explanation of the creators’ intentions, the phrases are included in a variety of scenarios in which the authors speculate about possible futures. The phrase “impersonal manipulations” is in a section about a possible future titled “Controlling Elite.” The subsequent section, “Conflict and Cooperation Among Peoples at Home and Abroad” focuses on a possible future where racial tensions lead to civil strive.

The actual goals and intentions of the project are laid out on page 6 and include, “Development of a new kind of elementary school teacher who is basically well-educated, engages in teaching as clinical practice, is an effective student of the capacities and environmental characteristics of human learning, and functions as a responsible agent of social change.”

Quote from the Text
“H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about ‘the perfect organization of the hive.’”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 83

Fact Check
Goodard did use this phrase but was talking about the general organization of a society, not government schools. His full quote from page 62 in his book: “It is said that the busy bee, so often held up to us as a model of industrious work, actually works twenty minutes a day. The explanation of the great amount that he accomplishes is said to be in the fact of the perfect organization of the hive. Perhaps it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less.”

Quote from the Text
“...the same age as Thomas Jefferson when as a young man Thomas began to manage a large plantation and 250 employees in Virginia (both his parents being deceased).”

Weapons of Mass Destruction by John Taylor Gatto, p. 29

Fact Check
According to The Practice of Slavery at Monticello on monticello.org, Jefferson “owned 607 men, women, and children, sold or gave away over 100 enslaved people, and purchased around 20 individuals.”

They were not employees.

Quote from the Text
“School bells were introduced to emulate factory bells, in order to mentally prepare children for their future careers.”

The End of Average by Todd Rose, p. 51 citing An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 222

Fact Check
It appears that Rose is referring to this line from Gatto, “Bells would ring and just as with Pavlov’s salivating dog, children would shift out of their seats and lurch toward yet another class.” There is, though, no mention of future careers. Gatto appears to be referencing the work of William A. Wirt in Gary, Indiana. A 1916 guide to the Platoon Plan used by districts across the country laid out how the plan might work and included the following quote, “Still another necessity is a good automatic signal system for the special rooms. As pupils move to and from the regular rooms only once in the middle of each session, the usual building signals will do for these rooms. A complete set of automatic signals for all rooms is better.” There is no reference to bells or future careers.

Quote from the Text
“Franklin’s great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache became the leading American proponent of Prussianism in 1839. After a European school inspection tour lasting several years, his Report on Education in Europe, promoted heavily by Quakers, devoted hundreds of pages to glowing description of Pestalozzian method and to the German gymnasium.”

An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, p. 167

Fact Check
The table of contents of Bache’s book lists that he went to half a dozen countries, dozens of schools and hospitals, and included a long list of names and documents in the appendix. Rather than "hundreds of pages," there are a handful of sentences on the German gymnasium. Regarding Pestalozzi, Bache wrote on page 87: “Pestalozzi’s writing method is too well known to need remark; in general it applies better to the formation of the German written letters than to ours.”