5th Grade Reading Levels

Award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto writes, in "Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education,"

In 1882, fifth-graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them.

In 1995, a student-teacher of fifth-graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper: "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

Gatto's article appears in Everything You Know is Wrong, published by Barnes & Noble Books.

No Child Left Behind - But Where Are We Going?

[In a document called the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, the U.S. Department of Education] outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967 ... [it] identified the future as one 'in which a small elite' will control all important matters ... Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant that they need to be controlled and regulated for society's good. ... It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions.

~ John Taylor Gatto,
"Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education"
in Everything You Know Is Wrong

Tired of Sleeping

Oh, Mom ...
the dreams are not so bad;
It's just that there's so much to do
and I'm tired of sleeping.

Oh, Mom ...
I wonder when I'll be waking.
It's just that there's so much to do
and I'm tired of sleeping.

~ Suzanne Vega