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By Bob Minor Minor Details
 John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.
This author of the book Dumbing Us Down observed in an interview, "My
license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature,
but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards
doing it."
As right-wing think tanks continue to misrepresent the over-all, measurable success of America's educational system in terms of its limited failures and the media repeat these misrepresentations, we might think that his is another conservative critique meant to prepare the populace for school vouchers and government aid to parochial schools. It is not. He is telling us that our schools, public and private, have an agenda which stifles our inborn humanity, and he is doing something about it. In my understanding this is because American schools (educator John Dewey called our public schools the "churches" of America) are meant to teach us to be "good citizens." That means first and foremost that we are taught to become governable. We are taught to be in awe of the powers in our society, to respect them, and do nothing which subverts the dominant paradigm. It means we are taught to subordinate our ideas, creativity, and intuitions, to the one's that will keep us from changing things, and those in power, too radically. In the past our schools have taught the prejudices of race and ethnicity, and on the whole they still teach classism, able-body-ism, heterosexism, and homophobia, as well as a less conscious racism. And anyone who points this out will be considered suspect, overly negative, subversive, leftist, un-American, etc. It's okay to criticize our schools for failures related to not providing business with the kinds of workers, managers, and consumers corporate America needs, but not for failure to produce human beings in touch with their inborn humanity and intrinsic, personal worth.
Fourth, since the major justification Americans give for an education is that it will get you a "better" job, it teaches not only that we will have to compete with all life forms for a limited number of "good" jobs, but that the economic standard of more money equates with the moral standard of "good." These ideas are usually unexamined, but some teachers try to raise these issues, try to counteract these ideas in the face of the overwhelming messages to consume, conform, and earn one's personal worth. John Gatto is one. We in the l/g/b/t community need to examine these issues ourselves as we face our educational system or our further schooling. We need to ask how much we want to assimilate to these standards and why. When one finally accepts that most difficult realization that one stands outside the dominant sexual orientation, and faces the consequences of that "queerness," a new freedom opens for us to stand outside all the dominant standards and examine them to decide what it could be like to live our own lives on our own terms with the others in our life. Those who have embraced this freedom have led progressive movements for change, produced great art, challenged the limits cultures place on creativity, refused to be stifled by gender roles, broken the sick fears of the dominant culture around sex and pleasure, and defined life in whole new terms. We l/g/b/t people do have important gifts to give to our culture which will shake it up for all humanity's sake, if we do not hide. Yet the dominant teachings tell us it is better to assimilate, to accept all the other rules of this game our culture plays, so that we can be tolerated as gay people. If that is the path we accept, and many of our own political leaders tell us to do so, we may be able to blend into the woodwork, but we will have lost the opportunity to give the kind of gifts to our culture that other non-dominant groups have given when the dominant culture "discovered" their art, music, tastes, ideas, ways of thinking, and human variety, as contributions to diversity.
And we get to choose to so live: taking from our educational careers what helps us thrive in life while refusing to be "dumbed down" by any institutions. Our culture needs such refreshing people. 
Robert N. Minor is author of Scared Straight: Why It's So
Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human and
Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He may be
reached at Minor@libertypress.net.
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No matter how our educational system wants us to blend in, we can choose
that easy path or we can face our fears, live our lives fully, and
contribute to deep-rooted change in a world that needs people who live
outside the same old, worn-out ideas and answers to human problems, the
difference today being that these ideas and answers are just dressed up in
the clothing of cyber-drag. And real living begins with all the little
challenges that every-day life raises, and continues until the world is a
better place for all life.
© 1997-2002 BEI