What does it mean to be an educated human?

According to John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto was a school teacher (both a New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year) turned critic of schooling. I have not yet read his books in full because I fear the cynicism and sense of hopelessness that will likely come from reading his critiques of the school system—I am already a cynic, his books will just bring me further down that rabbit hole. But I came across a podcast episode during which the hosts described Gatto's ideas for what it means to be an educated person, which prompted me to look into his work. He is not hopeless, rather urges his readers to take the matter of education into their own hands. In "The Guerrilla Curriculum: How to Get An Education In Spite of School," he describes three scenarios in which a person with specialized knowledge received through a school education could not use that knowledge to accurately make predictions in their respective fields. Thus, he questions whether the static knowledge taught in schools is indeed the proper education, and he advises his readers to "think the matter of education through. What does it mean to you?" He goes on to assert, "there isn't any right answer, only an answer that's right for you; if you leave that choice to someone else, the odds are against you." Gatto then lays out what he thinks an education is by describing his "Twelve Reflections on an Educated Person":

1. An education [sic] person writes his own script through life, he is not a character in a government or corporation play, nor does he mouth the words of any intellectual's Utopian fantasy. Education and intelligence aren't the same things. The educated person is self-determined to a large degree. 

2. Time doesn't hang heavily on an educated person's hands. She can be alone, productively, seldom at a loss for what to do with time.

3. An educated person possesses a blueprint of personal value, a unique philosophy which tends toward the absolute, not one plastically relative, altering to suit present circumstances. An educated person knows who he is, what he will tolerate, where to find peace. Yet at the same time, an educated person is aware of and respects community values.

4. An educated person knows her rights and knows how to defend those rights.

5. An educated person knows the ways of the human heart so well he's tough to cheat or fool.

6. An educated person possesses useful knowledge. She can ride, hunt, sail a boat, build a house, grow food, etc.

7. An educated person understands the dynamics of relationships, partially from experience, partially from being well-read in great literature; as a consequence he can form healthy relationships wherever he is.

8. An educated person understands and accepts her own mortality; she understands that without death and aging, nothing would have any meaning. An educated person learns from all her ages, even from the last hours of her life.

9. An educated person can discover truth for himself; he has intense awareness of the profound significance of being (as distinguished form doing), and the utter importance of being here and now.

10. An educated person can figure out how to be useful.

11. An educated person has the capacity to create: New things, new experiences, new ideas.

12. Education is built around ten cores: They [sic] metaphysical reality, the historical reality, the personal reality, the physical world within reach, the physical world outside personal awareness, the possibilities of association, an understanding of vocation, homemaking, the challenges of adulthood, the challenges of loss, aging and death. 

After pondering Gatto's reflections on an educated person, the question is: Can schools provide this sort of education? Gatto thinks not, at least not in their current form. In "The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know?" he proposes 10 suggestions for deconstructing institutional schooling that will put schools on a path to provide a better education, in his sense of the word. (This list is an abbreviation the original list.)

1. Make everybody teach. There should be no such thing as a non-teaching principal, or assistant principal, coordinator, specialist, or any other category of school employee who doesn't actually spend time in face to face interaction with kids. 

2. Let no school exceed a few hundred in size. Time to shut the factory schools forever; they are hideously expensive to maintain, degrade the children they encompass and the neighborhoods in which they stand; they present markets for every kind of commercial exploitation which would be badly hurt if schools were miniaturized.

3. Shut down "district" school boards and sharply constrict the power and size of state and large-city centralized school boards; they are a paradise for grifters and grafters and even if they weren't their long-range interventions are irrelevant at best and horribly damaging at worst, as well as being ruinously expensive. Trust students, parents and localities to want the best for themselves and to have the ability to learn how to get it.

4. Measure accomplishment by performance, most often performance against a personal standard. Standardized tests don't work, they correlate with nothing of human value, their very existence perverts curriculum into an advance preparation for the extravagant ritual administration of the tests. 

5. End the teacher certification monopoly which is only kept alive by illicit agreements between state legislatures and teacher colleges. It makes colleges happy, it supports an army of unnecessary occupational titles, and it deprives children—and competent adults—of valuable connections with each other.

6. Restore the primary experience base we have stolen from kids' lives. Kids need to do, not sit in chairs. The school diet of confinement, test worship, bell addiction, and dependence on low grade secondary experience in the form of semi-literate printed material cracks children away from their own innate understanding of how to learn and why. 

7. Install permanent parent and community facilities in every school—in a prominent place. We need to create a tidal movement of real life in and out of the dead waters of school. 

8. Understand that total schooling is psychologically and procedurally unsound. Give children some private time and private space, some choice of subjects, methods, and even of the company they keep. 

9. Teach children to think critically so they can challenge the hidden assumptions of the world around them, including the assumptions of the school world. This type of thinking power has always been at the center of the world's elite educational systems. Policy makers are taught to think, the rest of the mass is not, or is taught partially.

10. And finally, we must provide legitimate choices in education to parents and children: schooling can be performed under compulsion but education requires a strong element of volition. Anti-compulsion is essential to education, there is no one right way to do it or to grow up successfully either. That emperor has no clothes. One-right-way schooling has had a century and a half to prove itself; right from the beginning it was making excuses why it couldn't get the job done. That will never change.

The aim of Gatto's list is to minimize school and maximize education. Schools in their current form—pre-pandemic, that is—have persisted for over a century, thus Gatto acknowledges that changing the institution of schooling will require "courage to challenge deeply rooted assumptions, and a great amount of stamina for a long struggle." But none the less, he thinks an endeavor to genuinely change schools is possible and worthwhile.

This is the first in a series of articles with the same title: "What does it mean to be an educated human?"