The Guerrilla Curriculum, Already in Progress

A lecture by John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto, New York City’s most decorated and most dangerous schoolteacher, spent twenty-six years inside the system deliberately dismantling it from within, and this lecture is the unfiltered proof. While politicians debated curriculum reform and parents paid fortunes for tutors, Gatto was sneaking twelve-year-olds into City Hall hearings, dropping teenage girls off in Jersey swamps at four in the morning, and watching his “unteachable” students dropouts, criminals, the mute and the furious sail solo around the world, write books that got translated into seven languages, and land on the front of magazines, all without a single standardised test or an approved lesson plan. The Guerrilla Curriculum is the lecture the education establishment doesn’t want you to hear, because Gatto doesn’t just argue that school is failing your children. John proves, with names, photographs, and newspaper clippings, that it was never designed to succeed in the first place, and that any parent still handing their kid over to the system after hearing this has only themselves to blame.

Gatto’s central argument is that children are far more capable than the school system allows them to be, and that real learning happens through real responsibility, not classrooms. The main threads running through the lecture:

Children don’t need school to achieve extraordinary things. He opens with story after story, a bicycle messenger who taught herself navigation in a hurricane and sailed solo around the world, a third-grade dropout who walked 20,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, a thirteen-year-old who built a business and berated the New York Board of Education about it. These aren’t accidents, they’re his argument.

The school system is designed to keep children classified and dependent. Gatto uses the word “declassify” repeatedly. His whole teaching career was an effort to strip away the signals — the way kids walk, speak, carry themselves — that get them identified as children and put back in their place.

Apprenticeships and real-world participation beat any curriculum. Every kid in his class had one. He found that adults were desperate for the attention and intelligent questions young people brought. The kids had more currency than they realised.

You can game and bypass formal education entirely. He pushes John Bear’s guide to alternative degrees, correspondence credits from top universities at a fraction of the cost, the Shelter Institute in Maine, the boat-building school. The credentialing system is more porous than people think.

Parents and local power structures matter more than administrators. A handful of determined parents, a university letterhead, a sympathetic local business — these move schools more than any superintendent can.

The reading wars and self-esteem culture are largely fraudulent. Children learn to read naturally in loving, low-stakes environments. Formal settings create the very failures they claim to fix. And unearned praise does real damage.

The through-line is simple: treat children as people, give them genuine stakes in the real world, and they will astonish you.

We join John Gatto in his lecture entitled, The Guerrilla Curriculum, Already in Progress. And therefore, in no single decision of your life, if an expert’s available, should you not avail yourself of that person’s services. Well, if that’s true for Oz, who have been trivialised and made childlike, certainly since the end of the Second World War, then it’s true in spades for your kids and my kids and all the kids out there. So I’m here to contradict that with a little bit of documentary evidence.

I want to confess that is not well prepared and strategically arranged. Over the course of being a junior high school teacher in Manhattan, living in an apartment, there’s no space to store anything. And I’ll tell you that the conflicts come thick and fast, they never stop. There’s never a boat ride. So whatever documentation I have here sort of accidentally survived my transit through the world. However, why don’t you look at some of it? Some of this is my kids and some of it’s stuff I use to goose my kids into action. I’m gonna need a media expert to turn that machine on.

Hey, hey, hey. Let’s start with a seventeen year old girl who was thrown out of six New York City schools for being wretched. Impossible.

Seventeen year old girl whose father approached her, he was a minor artist in New York City. He had a few bucks, he was not rich by any means. But he said, it would cost me $60,000 to send you to college and I have a check for $60,000 in my hand and I’m going to give it to you. I want you to move out of the house immediately and I don’t care what you spend this money for. Buy drugs, I don’t care, he said.

On the other hand, he said, I’m prepared to buy you a twenty-six foot boat. It’s much more than twenty-six feet from me to that camera. A twenty-six foot boat if you will sail it around the world alone.

Now mind you, this girl was working as a bicycle messenger in Manhattan, was on these kamikaze bikes that go in and out of the traffic, delivered by a gentleman, thrown out of six schools. She had no background as a nautical woman. And obviously when she did take the necessary navigation courses to be allowed to sail out of New York Harbour, she cheated.

There was her maiden voyage, the first American woman to circumnavigate the globe alone. That’s not ancient history. That’s about seven or eight years ago. A bicycle messenger who cheated on a navigation test. How did she learn to navigate through some heavy duty mathematics?

Well, she tells it and I have no reason not to believe this is true. The generator went out about thirty or forty nautical miles from Bermuda and a Hurricane was coming up, I mean twenty, thirty, forty foot waves. And she knew that if she missed Bermuda, there’s nothing beyond it at all. And she would certainly be dead. There was no one on the boat. She couldn’t call anybody by telephone. She said, I sat there with an electric torch and the navigation books, and I figured out how to get that thing into Bermuda Harbour.

She had a cat on the boat, and two years later, she had sailed around the world alone, met a Danish kid doing the same thing. They got married. They live in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Say hello for me if you pop over. Now,

At the same time, general time, the beginning of the 1980s, beginning of the 1980s, a third grade dropout named George Meaghan, he’s a ratty looking guy in a lower left hand corner. He was the lowest ranked sailor on a tramp steamer crossing to South America, but he had this dream that he would walk from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, Alaska. He would walk from the south pole to the north pole as close as you can walk. He had no magnesium frame backpack. He had no freeze-dried food. He had no Adidas sneakers. He didn’t have anything. I think he had a map.

There and he jumped ship in Chile, got his way to Tierra del Fuego and seven years later, I think in 1980 or 79, he arrived at the North Pole with his family. He had met and married a Japanese girl along the way and they had two kids.

He had walked 20,000 miles. I know a sceptic in this audience is saying, but it’s not 20,000 miles. It’s only 13,000, that’s true. But when they crossed into Texas, he said, I’ve always wanted to see Washington, DC. So they detoured 7,000 miles and saw the Capitol. I’m sure many of you have done the same.

Now, if you open the newspaper, this is the last class newspaper. I didn’t use a photocopy. This was originally printed on newsprint. And it came out, I would guess, four or five times a year, irregularly. But this is the last issue that I did before the school district got on my case.

I said to myself, even though I live in an apartment, I think I ought to preserve this because one day when I’m telling people what kids are capable of doing, people are going to say, it’s easy to talk. But it’s not so easy. If you look on page two, to ignore the fact that this thirteen-year-old girl you see booked an appointment for herself at the evening speak out at the New York Board of Education. And she spoke for twelve minutes, actively berating the commissioners of New York schools, that she had just made $3,000, $4,000 in five weeks, cutting class and running a business, and that nothing in any curriculum in any school, including Stuyvesant, had anything to do with a job being anything other than what someone gives you for good behaviour. She said, the principles of American life lead people to independent livelihoods. And here you’re holding me for twelve years.

And I broke out and I’m here to tell you that you’re doing a wrong and a bad thing. So that’s BJ Cummings, teen businesswoman, slams board of ed on unrealistic curriculum. The year there is, I think it’s 1980 or 81. Now I’d like you to look at BJ Cummings as of 1991, eleven years later. She had dropped out of college. By the way, BJ was, as you can see in the photograph, a white young woman, a very fair complexion, who grew up in Harlem.

Why she did that was not because her family was ultra liberal, but the father was gone and the mother couldn’t afford to live anyplace else. So that’s where they grew up. I asked her several times whether that had had a horrifying effect on her development and she said that she hardly even noticed it anyway. Here’s BJ eleven years late.

BJ drops out of college in her freshman year, teaches herself Portuguese, hitchhikes to Brazil. How do you do that? I guess you go to Miami, you go to airports around there, and you talk some private pilot who’s going down there anyway into taking you, and apparently thousands of people do this. I mean, it’s another one of the great secrets. She gets to the Amazon.

She goes up the Amazon to an Indian village where the culture is being destroyed by the recent construction of a dam. And she writes a book in seven weeks called, The Rivers, Dam the People, about the political use of dams and other monumental construction, you know, to pay off the right people irrespective of the harm they do. The World Wildlife Foundation picked it up. I believe it’s translated into seven languages. Out of the book, she gets a free PhD from, I think, UCLA Berkeley, but one of the colleges down there. She just got married about a year ago. And when she came to Carnegie Hall to speak,

the year that I quit teaching, Pat Patfaringa was one of the speakers. She came to Carnegie Hall and she said, I can’t stay for the party afterwards because I’m lecturing in Bermuda about her specialty, which very few people have, to the effect of dam building on traditional cultures. Hey, that was BJ. I’d like to show you some more of this because what we’re working on is to what extent you can trust people that we call children and I believe wrongly so. We’ve invented the culture of childhood and we impose it.

I think the shortfall is very, very large. I’m trying to respect the fact someone’s tape recording this for whatever reason, I don’t know. Surely not to sell these things.

If you come to the talk tomorrow morning I’m giving you, hear me say glancingly that I made the structure of schooling the central academic study that we did. I was desperate to declassify children, or to have them declassify themselves. And I knew that could not take place as long as they would leave my room, or the activities that I allowed, and go back into the culture that told them who they were and what they could do and what numbers they had to display when they wanted to do them. One of the ways, this is an illustration of one of the ways that without preaching, I was able to attack the assumptions of schooling.

Now, there isn’t a person here or a person alive who hasn’t at one time or another said, why do I have to ask permission to go to the toilet there? And furthermore, I would tell the kids that, you know, that when I’m in the middle of one of these ranting expositions, I don’t want to be interrupted with some requests to go to the toilet because I’ll turn on you like a wild dog and humiliate you and I’ll discuss your privates and everything else. On the other hand, I had a standing offer. I said you can go to the toilet when you want to. All you have to do is take what you can’t see here is that there’s a hood too that goes on it.

You put the toilet pass on and then, and I said, if you want to make your own toilet pass out of an old sheet, you can just come to class like the Ku Klux Klan, man. But you can go to the toilet wherever you want to go. There it is.

The fellow activity was extremely limited in my class, but not because I prevented it.

In a city like Boston, and I really almost hate to say this because the truth is in the simplest country town, there are innumerable valuable things for kids to participate in as citizens. I mean, not as kids. But my imagination’s been tempered in cities and Boston certainly qualifies as one of those. They’re constantly public meetings in cities. Usually they’re pro forma, that is the decision’s already been made, but citizens are invited to make a presentation of their point of view. That’s an infinite number of opportunities for your kids, in fact, not as good little kids, but as people to bring some information to the attention of important people. And furthermore, to develop this cast iron personality where you’re not afraid to speak in any setting and you know how to organise information.

Let me tell you what, this hesitation is not caused by Alzheimer’s, it’s caused by thinking about whoever’s recording this. I wish I didn’t have to do this.

Okay, let me get the toilet pass away here first. Okay. When I arrived in New York City from Pittsburgh, I saw immediately the differences between a city that was organised in large part by its people for its people, to a city that was organised by elite groups who may have meant well by people, really didn’t understand their needs. That swimming, which is pathetically easy to do in Pittsburgh, far out of reach of, you know, any body of water that you’d want to be in. Opportunities to do that were abundant, whereas in New York City with the ocean lapping, I mean, nobody swims in New York City, and the public swimming pools had been reduced to five.

Fortunately, one of those five public swimming pools was very close to one of the schools I worked in and I was constantly looking for some official way to get masses of kids out of the building, the hard thing. Once they’re out of the building, whether they went swimming or not, I didn’t care. But a lot of them did go swimming, in fact. So I said, well, I don’t want to waste this time just having fun there. So I went up to Columbia and I got kids on the swimming team to come down and give lessons to those who wanted them.

But in any case, an announcement was made about ten years ago that all the public swimming pools were going to be closed because of a budgetary constraint, in any way nobody used them. That meant, by the way, and I’m, you would not be able to guess what political party I belong to, is what I’m going to say here. But that nobody used them meant that no upper middle class white kids used them, because plenty of people use these swimming pools. But they didn’t record on the instrumentation of the New York Times, which approved of the closures.

So, I made a standing offer to any kid in the school that if they were willing to go through a crash course in public presentation, I was willing to let them sign up and get down to City Hall and stand in these august chambers and make their case one right after another, which precipitated a crisis at the hearing, by the way, because it turned out about fifteen kids had signed up using their right to claim three or four minutes of time and the chairman, who was only marking time, I’m telling you all these hearings and decisions have been made ahead of time. You know, to let you ventilate. He was too impatient to let them speak, at which point we got tough with the city commissioners. Anyway, one after another.

Flavin Ginsburg, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is truly why it’s called our neighbourhood swimming pool. Because you think not enough people use the pool. The reason more people do not use the swimming pool is because nine out of ten west siders have no idea there is a swimming pool on West 59th Street. Marissa Demar, I’m representing the young citizens of the West 86th Street neighbourhood. Oh no, that was somebody else.

Good afternoon, my name is Israel Panayaga. I’m here today representing the teenage swimmers. You want us to swim in the Hudson River or in Central Park Lake? That would get pretty cold in the autumn, winter and spring. Instead of closing the pool someday, we need more days, and on and on. I’ve pages of these people appearing. I don’t know what effect this had. Just as I’m afraid I do know what effect the girls had on the Beatles Memorial in Central Park, but the swimming pools were not closed. They were not closed and nobody else of any effectiveness was at the hearings to speak for the swimming pools because we all knew it was a foregone conclusion. You’ll hear me refer tomorrow if you come to the talk in the morning.

To a girl who constantly tossed her long blonde hair. I mean, hundreds of times an hour. I’m sure you’ve seen women like that. Somehow or other, just cannot keep the hair out of their eyes. And I had noticed that she had, at all times, one hundred per cent of the male attention in the class, including mine.

I also knew that there wasn’t a girl in the classroom who would not have cheerfully cut her throat. So I decided to defuse this hostility toward Caitlin. And I asked Caitlin, I said, listen, we have to make the subject, if it’s agreeable to you, the subject of your tossing your hair an intellectual exercise in the classroom, that we have to examine sociologically whether or not there isn’t some device that might keep the hair out of your eyes and you healthy. Let me show you Caitlin.

Okay, was Caitlin a model when the incident I’m talking to you about happened? No, Caitlin extracted a price for allowing herself to be used as the subject of the academics in the classroom. She said, I want three weeks out of school and I don’t want it to show on any school record. She said, and I’m gonna figure out how you get a job as a cover model. I said, can you do this on this?

It’s not a cover model and it’s $2,000 an hour range. I said, if you do it as a catalogue model or something humble and make the information available to other kids, you got a deal. Well, somebody was wrong because there you see not only that cover, but this cover. There’s many, many. Caitlin’s a lawyer today.

Whether she paid her own way through law school, I do not know, but I do know that her mother, who approved of the project strictly on the grounds that she was a hundred per cent certain that Caitlin had no opportunity whatsoever to get this, had booked her into a youth camp in Poland during the communist years that summer. There certainly was some bad blood between us. It was unintentional.

The hottest nightclub in New York City for the last few years has been the New York Poets Cafe. The New York Poets Cafe was literally built and put together by a former student of mine and now a very, very close friend, Roland LaJardy-Laura. He’s been written about all over the world.

The Cafe is a phenomenal place where every Friday there’s an original play written by some member of one of New York’s minority communities. Every Saturday there’s a poetic competition where the audience votes victory or destruction. And every Tuesday an original film script is acted out by the best actors in New York City. I mean people that you’ve seen all over the place. All that was put together by a boy and several other people without parents, without any inheritance at all, who lived for a number of years after he got out of school, kind of like pickup. I mean, he’d sleep at somebody’s place and somebody else’s place and somebody else’s place.

At the age of thirty-four, he was earning $3.50 an hour as a seat of poet. That was a government programme that brought poets into schools. And I can tell you, I witnessed several of the encounters between New York City school children and poets. We can’t describe them in mixed company.

He is a secret to this. Okay, there you see Roland in the upper right hand corner and you see his first film. He comes to me at thirty-four and he says, I wanna make a film. I say, you’ve never shown any interest in film at all. You don’t even have a still camera. He says, I know, but I’ve just discovered that the national sport of Nicaragua is poetry.

And I want to make a film called Nicaragua, Land of Poets. I said, you can’t even pay the rent. You want to make a film that costs, I don’t know, $400,000 about poets. I said, can you imagine anybody buying a ticket to that film? If you made it, what would you do with it? But I gave him fifty bucks because on a school teacher’s income, that was the maximum expense. And I drove him to the airport. He got a ticket to Nicaragua.

I dropped him off at like six-thirty in the morning. And about four months later, he was back with a whole bunch of stills of washerwomen and soldiers, all of them declaiming poetry to each other. And I said, if this is really true, it’s as revolutionary a thing as I’ve ever heard.

And Nicaragua isn’t even a country that people can spell, let alone want to go there, as there are sharks in the freshwater lake. And these people are all poets. They have no wealth. They have no tradition of fine culture and they’re all poets, and he says yes. He raised $400,000. He won nine film awards with it and his next project was the New Yorker Poets Cafe. And right now he and I have raised together $400,000 and are $800,000 short of making a series of films about schooling in the United States, a three part series. That’s what I’m doing. I’ll leave here, I’m going to worry.

But how was Roland in class at thirteen? Well, he hardly ever was in class at thirteen. He was everywhere that poets were. He told me that at thirteen that he would never wear a necktie in his life and he never has. Never wear a necktie in his life and that he was going to make his living as a poet. Jesus, and what do you say to a kid like that? Lots of luck?

I mean, high-paid politics get $5 a poem. There’s absolutely no market for it. Well, I’m wrong. Here are some things that I’m really surprised don’t show up more, but I’m sure they will in homeschooling communities. One of the best ways to bond kids together, and I guess in Boston here, did someone, or a lot of you, do something with the PG Wodehouse, apply and Pat played the piano, but I constantly, I mean it wasn’t a year. It wasn’t a year that I didn’t put together, and I didn’t do it. You know, some kid producer would put together, on the strength of being free of schooling for as long as they needed to be, put together a travelling talent show.

Where do you get audiences for a travelling talent show? You can’t beat them off with a stick. There are all the old age homes, there are hospital wards. There are first, second, and third graders who love to watch slightly older kids sing, dance, juggle, declaim, and then sit around with those kids and learn how to do that themselves. So this was a standard of the last ten years of my teaching. I mean, my talent teams were moving around New York City, booking themselves in.

Every once in a while I would stick an oar in to make sure. Now I would always insist on, if I tell you that I don’t believe in, I don’t believe childhood exists, Pat, I don’t know, the age is seven, eight, nine, somewhere, probably you play it by ear with your own kid. So if people are out there demanding the time or attention of the community, then they owe the community something. I think it’s reciprocity. It’s not one way.

Look at another thing that was a constant in my classroom, is that certainly it would be the easiest thing in the world to do if you’re willing to get up at two in the morning. We would end up an hour later at the Bronx Terminal Market, which easily is the most dangerous single place in the United States. I mean, you’re in the middle of only an utter wasteland with lots of strange people wandering around, because there’s stuff coming in and out from all over the country every day, and you grab some of it, it’s dark.

But I’ll tell you this, I approached the idea to some kids, I said, I think you can make real money doing this. They said, ah, no one will sell wholesale to kids. I said, why don’t you just try somebody with money in your hand and see whether they care what age you are. I mean, a little baby could crawl up and hold out the money and he’d get the radishes too. So I started it off in the simplest fashion by demonstrating that it could invigorate the life of the school.

Now the school was highly resistant, but I said, okay, we’ll just use checkout time one day a week and just run it for like twenty-five minutes there. Well, the first time we ran it, there were three boys involved, each made net $30 after paying me for my driving. It made thirty bucks apiece. I had put up the original stake to buy the stuff. But a lot of teachers were furious with me because they had left a little bit late and there weren’t any of these fresh fruits and vegetables left when they got there. Kids were able to sell them twenty, thirty per cent cheaper than the market. But the difference is, they were one day old and the markets are all, the fresh stuff you buy is cold storage. It’s six, seven, eight, nine weeks old. So here you’re selling a superior product at less money cost and providing an excellent revenue for three young entrepreneurs.

I said, I’m not going to get up at two in the morning all the time, but I’ll bet you can find a building custodian who knows when the last tenant goes to sleep and will be happy to run you up, you know, and do the turn-around in a couple of hours. Which happened. One of these boys who originally started this is a manager of a restaurant now down in the South Street Seaport.

And one of them, oh, this is amazing. One of them is one of these billionaire vitamin hustlers who runs these hard sell ads on the radio. And, you know, there’s some earnest interview with someone who says, right, you know, I got rid of everything, my ugliness, my cancer, it all happened. Really. Oh my kids.

Okay, okay. Let me see if there are any here that are, I want to show you some of the range of things that are possible that seem to me very possible in the Boston area. This was an absolute winner.

Yeah, okay. Is that working? Yeah, okay. Manhattan’s broken into, I don’t know, thirty or thirty-two zip code zones. And to most of us, that’s just a slight extra burden when you’re addressing envelopes. But in fact, a huge part of the marketing business depends on knowing the human characteristics of the people in the zip code zone, and you can buy certain zip code zones, and you’ll pay through the nose for ones in which people, for example, have made a purchase by mail in the last thirty days from a zip code zone. You pay a lot, but what you’re getting is prime suckers who’ve already revealed what their weakness is.

I was looking for ways to break the urban fear of moving by your own legs and feet. You know, you’ve got to wait for a bus or a subway in New York City. And I was looking for some way to provide a rationale for actually, what I wanted the kids to do was to walk all over Manhattan. It’s twelve miles long. It’s about two miles wide. It’s not a very difficult thing to master Manhattan.

When I came from Pittsburgh to Columbia University, I used to set aside a street like Broadway and I would walk from, you know, like 180th Street on Broadway all the way down to the Staten Island Ferry on Saturday, and then I would shift over to something like 6th Avenue and pick it up at 59th Street and walk the length of it. I wanted to know every street in my city. I’d go to the baseball game at Yankee Stadium, it was nine miles away. That’s not a very long walk. And by walking there, you pass through these changing neighbourhoods. So I realised in a very, very short time,

that I knew considerably more about New York City than the people I knew who had grown up there their whole life. Because they would only travel on tracks or in vehicles. And the city is much constrained when you do that. Well, so this project was to pass through the different zip code zones, and it took quite a long time, with the knowledge of what the median income in the zip code zone was, and trying to see how a difference in one thousand or two thousand dollars a year median income turns out in shop windows, in the way people dress, in the housing and the cleanliness of the streets. It’s quite incredible the tiny differences show up.

And if any of you know the famous American sociologist, the Jenks, Christopher Jenks wrote a blockbuster book about schools in 1964 called Inequality, in which he maintained that the difference of $1,000 a year in income makes a radical difference in the culture of the family.

And when I was supposed to throw that out right away, suddenly it dawned on me that just $1,000 a year would mean that the young lady could have three party dresses a year and maybe the guy, the kid, the boy could go to a baseball game four or five times, that the family might be able to eat out once a month instead of never eating out except at McDonald’s, they might be able to have a subscription to the local newspaper. It is a vast difference at a time. Jenks correlated it with scores on the SAT exams and he said it is an absolute positive correlation. That you add $1,000 in income, he says you can count on, I forget what the chunk of points is, you can count on it. You can just bank that information.

So I wanted the kids to experience that in person without preaching, but also I wanted them to be aware of one of the many vast ways to make a living that are utterly invisible to people who really aren’t coached. If you know that the marketing industry exists in your early teens, or even before that, you know how you’re manipulated. You know why that suddenly in September all the clothing is purple or the left sleeve is four inches longer than the right sleeve. You can see the people making these decisions, hiring the Beatles or whoever their publicists are to peddle this as if it were some natural expression of First Amendment rights, and to milk it for as much cash as you can get, and then you do it again, and you can do it endlessly as long as people are unaware that they can be manipulated that way. The minute they’re aware, it’s much, much harder to manipulate them.

Well, I’m gonna, I have lots of other things to do, but I’m gonna stop right after I show you Victor. Right after I show you Victor.

Victor, that’s Victor. Did they give you Victor’s resume? It would knock your socks off. This is a fifteen year old kid, excuse me, fourteen year old kid, who never ate off a tablecloth in his life, who was listed in the school records as a criminal. I mean, just open and shut. Had a list of police charges against him.

This is a boy who was hired as a television producer at the age of fifteen when he presented his resume of what he had done. Master of ceremonies at Carnegie Hall. He had been an adviser to Senator Kerry in his presidential run for the Democratic nomination, the one that Clinton got. He was a personal friend of Debra Winger. I mean it just went on and on and on because Victor never came to school.

And there you see Victor in white tie and tails. He arrived at Carnegie Hall. As usual, he didn’t know his part. And I grabbed Victor and I said, Victor, your mother’s gonna be out there and she is gonna be humiliated. I don’t have time to holistically show you something about standing on a stage in the most awesome theatre, probably in the world. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. The seats climb up at a very, very steep pitch. So the whole room is there when you’re there. I said, Victor, I’m going to give you a course in rhetoric in ten minutes. And if you do it exactly what I tell you to do, the audience will think that you were born with a microphone in your hand.

I said, if you do anything like what you just showed me, I said, you’ll disgrace your mother. I said, the audience will restlessly slowly edge to a seat closer to the door.

Learned it instantly, instantly. I said, Victor, only say two or three words and then throw a hesitation in your voice. I said, there are ways to do that. I said, forget, we don’t have time. Just every two or three words, a little hesitation in your voice like that. Sometimes when you complete a sentence, Victor, I said, let two or three beats go by before you start the next one. Just stuff like that, which I learned in third grade in a Jesuit seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where I was beaten almost every day, because I wouldn’t eat the beetroot. But they grew it at the seminary. I wouldn’t eat beetroot anyway, even if you beat me.

Would you take a look at the newspaper model that you have? None of it is dumbed up. None of it is the result of foundation grants or collegiate expertise. All of those things are real. Almost all of them were generated by the kids. The three girls who were the best writers in the class rewrote all the stories so that it would have the same tone in each of them. Because we had a secondary purpose. I said, if you can get yourself in three newspaper articles, it’s not an accident this paper is laid out a lot like the New York Times. Because if you cut these things out and paste them up, nobody knows these came from a school newspaper. So if you have three of these, I said, that’s a college scholarship, it’s a summer job. I said, it’s big advantages, and private school kids more or less are taught these things, that you document who you are.

I taught the kids how to build a resume backwards. You start with the only point of a resume. I know that it’s caused this great grief in many lives and it caused it in mine, but a guy in the Princeton admissions office told me twenty years ago, he said the only point of a resume is to show that you can handle responsibility and the more different kinds of responsibility. And it’s a throwaway when people put it down as if it didn’t matter.

Let me tell you something, that a balanced human being will have a physical hobby, they’ll have a social hobby, and they’ll have an intellectual hobby. Not every, not basketball, football, swimming, ta-da, but basketball, chess, long distance hiking, that you show with your hobbies what you do when your time’s your own. All the rest of the stuff is when you’re under the direction of some adult or official. But what you select on your own, he said, is utterly decisive. And if you show through that line that you don’t know how to use your own time, he said, I can tell you this, we don’t want you at Princeton.

And why should you want a person like that in it? I’m being a little bit strong and heavy handed here. When it’s so easy to develop these different aspects, which I think are universal to all of us.

Okay, if you take five minutes free from my voice and breath for yourself and leaf through this newspaper, you will see a variety of undertakings that the class was doing in a, I would guess, six week period. And many of them aren’t in here. We only print all the news that fits. We print. And then maybe afterwards you guys can talk and ask me what it is that you’re particularly interested in. Meanwhile, I’ll just look at the crowd.

You can have my copy here. But then what, oh I have two copies. Oh, that’s not funny. See the boy and the girl on the lower right, page three?

It’s five in the morning at the Port Authority bus terminal which next to the wholesale food market in New York City has to be the second most dangerous place in the United States. They’re leaving on a bus. I’m not putting them on the bus. Their mother’s not putting them on the bus, but my wife is putting them on the bus. They’re leaving on a bus for Albany, New York where three hours later they’ll step off the bus and they will notify their state representative that they’re in town to see what he does for his constituents. He does not know they’re coming. That’s him in the first column on page three. And they said to me, well, what if he won’t talk to us or won’t see us? And I said, well, then you get on the bus and you’ll come back to New York City.

Yeah. About two years ago, someone said to me, oh, do you know what happened to Jason Weinberg? He’s the fellow who’s grinning. Judy Tresca. I ran into her mother on a Broadway bus and she said, you know, Judy, who couldn’t speak, you ever run into girls like guys too, who are absolutely mute. They cannot speak. Period. They can speak one to one, but in a classroom setting, they can’t talk. She said, Judy just got out of law school. She said, going to Albany, it changed her life. Not all at once, but bit by bit, she just threw that personality away. They were invited to go over and address the New York State Senate. They were taken out to dinner. And you know what would have happened if you had asked permission to go in advance? Permission denied. That’s right. Okay.

Oh man, got it. Yes. Here’s what happened to Jason Weinberg. Some local New York throwaway rag, publicity with Jason Weinberg, playing with one of his clients, a really supermodel, Michelle, whatever. Jason, not a bad way to earn your living. And Judy’s a lawyer, so when Jason gets in trouble as you and I know he will.

Do you see anything in those papers that you’d like to ask about or comment about? There’s really some revolutionary stuff there.

At a time when the local democratic clubs on the upper west side of Manhattan had announced that after a month long voter registration drive, they could only get 500 votes because there was tremendous voter apathy. And my kids said, well, why is there voter apathy? I said, there isn’t. I said, if you owned all the jobs, would you want new people to register in your party who might change the direction the party was going in?

And they said, that can’t be true. And I said, well, I’m going to declare a two day school holiday. Why don’t you go out and register people yourself on the west side of Manhattan? And as you’ll see on the first page of the newspaper, in two days, my kids registered a thousand voters. But in the sign-ups on the street run by the local political clubs for a month, only 500 voters signed up.

One kid said, a woman opened a window high up in a building and screamed, are those voter registration forms? In New York City, they’re huge and they’re like orange, orangeish. So there’s nothing else looks like them. She said, I’m coming right down. And he said, the kid said, the guy was talking on the payphone on the street. He threw the phone down and ran over, give me one of those. You might wonder why they’re so desperate to get one.

To get one right away, you have to travel to a single location in Manhattan that’s extremely remote. It’s I think on 10th Avenue and 26th Street. And then it’s on the tenth floor of a building and no employee in the building as far as I can see is under seventy-five or eighty. So they’re not really anxious. I mean, it’s the final payoff for a life badly lived.

Is there anything now that, or even if it isn’t in the paper? Yes, sir.

A lot of different ways is the answer. When you’re determined to do it, whatever works, works. For example, if a particular kid is in tremendous pain, you never go through the authorities. Never, never, never. No instance. You go to the other teachers and you say, would you mind if Jason Weinberg isn’t in the class for a few days. Nobody ever says, oh, I’d mind terribly.

Now, occasionally, and there are a lot of different ways I’ll show you some, occasionally, if you say, you mind if the class didn’t show up for the next couple of days. You very, very seldom, I mean, you say they’re doing a project at Columbia University with the retired professors, which by the way is a live possibility for you. They’re desperate for something to do. Often they’re the best people in the department or the heads of departments. And there can’t be a college that doesn’t have a retired professors chapter. And my kids had a key to the astronomy thing, you know, you look at Carl Sagan’s ridiculous ideas, or the man of the world, where people live or something lives.

Another way to do it is to actually, if you think of the politics of schooling, nobody at all who’s visible has any positive power to change the system. That includes the principal, the superintendent. They have negative power to put drag on things that would change the system. The positive power, it’s almost all rhetoric. But notice that just as the government in ancient Sparta had no power at all. I mean, they put on these shows for the public. And if you knew who the Ephors were, or if you read Hobbes’ Leviathan, you can figure out where the Ephors were. I tried to figure out who, in fact, was calling the shots in the schools, if they wanted to. And I was able to establish layers and layers.

One of them would be the politics of schooling, to be a list of about fourteen power bases. But I can remember enough of them. The local business community is much, much more important than your superintendent. Now, you’ve got to know, it’s not the local business community. What does that vast generalisation mean? There will be businesses that are constantly active in the school because they sell the straws or a variety of other products. They keep an eye on the schools. Those people are extremely vulnerable to an interesting project to do. And once they say, yeah, I’d like to do that, or would like to take in your kids as an apprentice one day a week, I guarantee you there’s not a principal or superintendent in the United States who would dare to even think about saying no.

If you have a local university with political clout, and of course Columbia was just a few blocks from me, there is not an instance where something requested on a Columbia letterhead would in fact be denied by a local school district. And I’m sure Boston’s full of colleges that have similar clout to that.

A resource that I had reference to was parents. It’s very difficult to reach parents but I would start each school year and actually visit as many homes as I could because that was done to me when I was in school in Pittsburgh. I would call, I would give information sessions, and I’d hold a little party one day a week, a coffee and doughnuts party. I never got more than a third of the parents, but often I got that many of them would show up. And now I had a personal relationship. I would say that a group of five, six, seven parents could bring any school in the country to its knees, if they so chose, and the principal is well aware of that.

So he will not choose, as long as he’s not told too much about what you’re doing, he doesn’t want to know anyway, but will not choose to deny those requests. Every once in a while, I would get a class for a year, not often. And I did this for about twenty-one years. That was thirty-eight taught. Maybe twice that happened, but then there were no restraints caused by other teachers. If you want to do it, you can do it. If you’re the homeroom teacher, obviously nobody else really has the power to punish your kids because even if they do, you’re the one who enters the punishment on the records. You know, hey, hey, well, we won’t go into that.

Are there some other questions or comments on what you see there? This is meant to be an illustration that young kids are capable of anything and furthermore, just because they’re capable of it, it’s not a reason to do it. The payoff is very, very quick. Doesn’t happen right away. But ninety days after your kid has shouldered real responsibility, you’re not talking to a kid any longer, really. You’re talking to a human being of one or the other gender who looks you in the eye and doesn’t want their time wasted. The learning about a mature way to live is breathtakingly fast if it’s allowed to occur.

Here, let me show you one other picture here. What you’re about to see, if I can find it, is a seven year old boy, an eight year old boy, he says desperately leafing through these, and a thirteen year old boy on the Staten Island ferry at the moment before they set out to ride across the United States on their bicycles.

Now they got to deal with their parents that once every hundred miles they will check in.

No, well, it was there, but you’re not going to get to see it. And that happens all the time. I mean, outside of our awareness, and maybe many of the people are in the room right in front of me, outside of our awareness, there are thousands of people who grow up in the United States a different way. And there’s abundant evidence if you go to the primary sources of American history, that a great many of the people who later had power in the society grew up a different way.

Yes. It’s a surprise, it happens both ways. I see something in the paper, the kid sees something in the paper, or the kid has some compelling need to move in a certain direction that’s been muted in all the venues that the kid travels in, but if you listen, they’ll all tell you.

People used to argue that there was a need to do testing. I would say that there cannot be a public school teacher with any brains in their head at all who at the end of the first day from simply intensely watching the kids in front of them, doesn’t know where they’re going to score, doesn’t even know a whole lot about their home life.

So you listen to the kids. I would set myself the goal not of doing things for classes. Remember, I’m trying to declassify children, but for doing things for individual kids. If I see a kid who’s mute and will not speak, I know that they are so badly damaged in the journey ahead of them that nothing else should matter at all except giving them some audiences that they can speak before and develop the ability to swim like some noble fish through the human environment they face. That does not heal itself as you get older, it gets worse. I mean, there are exceptions to that, but not many of them. And certainly by thirteen, there can’t be many classes where other than five or six kids don’t dominate the oral environment.

I would get kids like that aside. Got one who’s a lawyer now too, Larry Engelson. I took him aside, I said, Larry, if you ever raise your hand in this class again or say anything, I said, I’m just gonna destroy your grade, which for Larry meant getting a ninety-six instead of a ninety-nine or something. I said, you already have mastered that trick. And for you to endlessly practise on people where you already know your subject is a waste of your time, and you’re preempting time that belongs to people who need a safe environment to speak in.

I saw Larry Engelson three or four years ago and he said that one encounter. And I said, you know, I’ll trade you, go out and find tough audiences, Larry. And they’re not hard to find and you know, hone your skill. He said it changed his life. Being able to see himself with his little trick, doing the trick over and over, wondering why, you know, what works for us. At the end of a school year, I would often take whatever I had done that worked, just throw it away. I didn’t want to think about it again. I wanted to always start from scratch and see people not as representatives of types, but as what they are, like their fingerprint, utterly unique. They each require a private and personal curriculum. There are certainly good things that are valuable to everybody.

Yes, ma’am. Absolutely. That’s brilliant. What this lady said is these are spectacular stories. But when you’re compelled to be a performer in front of a workshop, people don’t want to hear about little triumphs like, like, like, May, who had a brilliant understanding and sensitivity to the Chinese language, you know, and just sounded like some ignorant woman in English, and I knew that May was capable, if not overnight, almost that quickly of simply moving this feeling she had from one to the other. I’d do that, I’d talk to May after school, not about that. I mean, we would talk about ideas.

And one day, May, and I don’t know if this is a universal Chinese characteristic, but certainly in some of the Chinese immigrants in New York City, it’s a kind of a really aggressive disdain, and May drew something, pulled it down on my desk and went to her seat and I looked at it and I mean tears would come to your eyes. This thirteen year old girl, who wasn’t even in her own culture, and it was magnificently subtle and powerful. I knew immediately that I better not open my mouth about language in front of this girl because she would put me in my place. With a mute kid,

for that person to see that they have a right to be heard is a huge victory. Just with that, with somebody who is always whining, to realise that it doesn’t hurt very much to get punched, even if someone beats you black and blue, because it hurts, it really doesn’t. What hurts is to constantly slink around.

And I’ll talk about this tomorrow and in fact I picked that out as an incident. Because the school environment in most places is brutal regardless of what you see as parents. So that’s a good school, they’re okay. I mean it really is like under the surface of a mill pond. These kids are always hitting each other and the kids are saying something devastating that just ruins you.

I mean, I would have to speak from a male point of view. This whole idea that in holistic whole word exercises, you know, that you just take risks with language, not in front of that seven year old girl up there who you were, who just paralysed your tongue, your tongue swells up in your mouth. You’re not going to take any risks. You’re going to play it safe. And certainly not in front of the boy who lives to humiliate you when you get out in the play. You’re not gonna take these risks.

I know I’m a little bit off the subject here, but one of the great anomalies is this great reading war that’s taking place. It’s this miscast inside a safe home environment where there’s some love and you can take risks. You know, it works like a charm. I mean, it’s hard to stop somebody from learning how to read. But you put people in a formal, staged setting and pretend that it’s the same. It’s like pretending that a school teacher is a mother or father. You know, it’s bunk.

So there he said.

Yes, ma’am. Could you speak a little louder? That’s one of the tricks I would always use. That’s how you can say anything you want in the class, but you’ve got to say it loud enough for everybody to hear.

The answer is yes, this whole self-esteem stuff, you don’t deserve self-esteem until you have some sense of who you are and what your power is. And everybody has power, and everybody’s somebody. But if you lay on, one of the most damaging things is to lay on praise that isn’t earned.

Obviously, as your own kid, you know, there is love and respect here that’s mutual. Let the kids know, kids will constantly bring you drawings. And I know what happens in homeschools as well as public schools, drawings that they’ve copied from comic books. You know, they’re not bad as imitations there, but at some point, at some point you have to point out that imitating someone else’s art is not where it’s at. It may be a stage on the way. I don’t mean to put the kid down. When they do that, I say, what you’ve done,

that looks pretty much like Spider-Man’s song, but look, you’ve got the Spider-Man model in front of you, and you don’t see that all the panels aren’t the same size, that when they want to indicate speed, there might be three long, narrow vertical panels in a row. You know, when they want to stop the action of the reader’s mind, they use the whole page, or sometimes the guy’s hand or his foot will go out of the barrier. And you were looking at it when you copied. But you were so frightened about violating the frame, you know, so go back and look at it harder and make it a better copy and then start thinking of your own ideas.

There wasn’t a year when my kids didn’t besiege Marvel Comics or DC. I think DC’s had a bit, but I don’t know that. And the editor of Marvel Comics lived in my building and I was not loath to make that fact known, but I taught kids discreet approaches. You know, I remember millions of kids, you know, sell the family home and migrate to New York so they can go to Marvel Comics. The last thing you want to see if you’re in the comic business is a kid. You know, what can they possibly do except damage. I said, but you’ve got to find a way to offer a quid pro quo. You must not ever ask for something unless you’re really in duress, unless you have something to give in return.

And kids will often say, but I don’t have anything to give in return. And that’s foolish. Simply close attention and their feedback is priceless stuff that market research firms charge through the nose for. There’s a natural payoff in a kid who’s intelligent and interested and passionate and respectful of what they’re asking for. The natural payoff. The most unexpected thing about placing, it wouldn’t be a year when every one of my kids wouldn’t have either a long apprenticeship or a number of short apprenticeships.

I thought that these would be extremely difficult to get. And by the third or fourth year, way more people were calling and saying, can you send more of these kids, than I had kids to distribute. It wasn’t because I had awakened the milk of human kindness in their breast, it’s because your kids have a currency to trade for what they’re given. Just their attention and their intelligent questions. Haven’t you had as parents the experience that I had regularly as a teacher, that the kid will see an aspect of something you know that you have not seen, and it’ll deepen or broaden your own understanding?

Look at what we’ve done to our so-called adult communities by bleeding all the children out of them during the work day and bleeding all the old people out of them. You only need to read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography to understand the vitality that crackled through colonial America when everybody virtually was a person mixing together.

I don’t know if that’s an answer to the question. Yes, ma’am.

We repeat that again, what you just said, repeat.

Yeah, right. OK, I am too.

There’s a whole variety of answers to that, but I’ll give you a few definite ones. I heard you say you wanted your kid to take college courses. Did I hear that correctly? Why don’t you show me?

Is there anybody here who’s not heard of Dr John Bear? This would be worth the price of the whole conference just by itself. And call him, I’ll give you the town he lives in, Benicia, I think it’s California, it’s on the San Francisco Bay, B-E-N-I-C-I-A. Bear has for the last thirty years been putting out a thick telephone book catalogue called Bear’s Guide to Alternative Ways to Go to College. I’ve made that up. You can buy it here, but if it’s a Ten Speed Press one, I would not buy. Flatly. Bear sold his to Ten Speed Press about seven years ago and Ten Speed Press has cut it way down to like a hundred schools. For the same money, you can buy it directly from John Bear in Benicia. He retained the rights to sell the whole thing. Call him up and say, I want to buy one of them. You give me a Visa thing, you’ll get it.

And I will tell you this, my daughter who graduated from MIT and was making a lot of money for IBM and said, this is tremendously dull, but it’ll get better. Right? I said, no, you’ll make a lot more money. It’ll get duller. And she said she wanted to try school teaching for a couple of years. And I said, you’ve got about twenty to thirty-six of these insane pedagogical credits to take. I said, however, you can take them by mail by correspondence from hundreds of schools in the United States.

And so instead of paying Bank Street College $350 a credit and going for two years, which she wouldn’t have done, she paid Penn State $75 a credit and got all, whatever it was, thirty or whatever it was, in six months and told me, but she had learned more from doing it that way than she’d learned from any course she ever took at MIT.

So she got her teaching licence instantly, much, much cheaper. And furthermore, I’ve had, I didn’t have a ten year old kid who’d go. I had a thirteen year old boy who started while he was in junior high school. And when his friends were, and by the way, he was a C student. When his friends were freshmen or sophomores in high school, he already had his degree from Fordham, which, you know, if you’re into Jesuit schools, it’s no bad place there. You can, no matter what the specialty that requires college credits is, board degrees, you can take those degrees or those credits by correspondence from the greatest schools in the United States at about forty per cent to a third of the cost of going to the college. Furthermore, the degree or the credit is stamped by mail, they’re exactly the same degree that Harvard gives if you go to Harvard. Now, I think that’s something to you. Or Stanford or Cal or the New York State system, which is excellent.

Yes, ma’am. He took two years of college credits beginning in junior high school. So I guess he got the second year when he was at the end of his freshman year in high school. And then the college, after seeing that he had two years of work, took him in as a student. And they said that he would get his high school diploma at the same time he got his college degree. And I remember, now it just came to me, my daughter was furious.

When she got to MIT, she said, this place is heaving with kids who went to high school from the back of those matchbox packages. You can get your high school diploma by mail. And they’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, she said. And MIT didn’t have any trouble taking them in.

Get Bear’s book, get the real Bear’s book from Bear himself. It’s only legal for him to sell the real one by mail order. I don’t know his address, but I do know that his name’s in the phone book and it’s Benicia and you can call him up and you’ll have it. Give him an extra three dollars with that as priority mail and you’ll have it. And then, sky’s the limit. You want a couple of PhDs? You want a law degree?

BEAR, Dr John Bear.

Say that one more time.

Oh, how about a PhD from the London School of Economics where Mick Jagger went? Sure, absolutely.

It’s Bear’s Guide to Alternative, that’s it, someone says it back there. It’s a non-traditional, but they’re not, they’re the same degree, from the same school. I mean, it’s a non-traditional way to get them, that’s all. You do it yourself.

Yeah. Let me repeat what this young fellow is saying here. He took the Shelter Institute course in Bath, Maine, which all by itself is a trip. Bath, it’s so nice, isn’t it? And it’s three weeks.

Okay, so they do it a lot of different ways, but then they have one straight three-week thing. They’ll teach you to build a post and beam house and if you stay an extra week or two, you know, they’ll add plumbing or foundations or whatever to it. It’s one family and if the kids grew up they’ve joined the business. I was the keynote speaker for their twenty-fifth anniversary three years ago and I’ll tell you in a room this size the walls were covered with houses built by bus drivers or psychiatrists. The people were transported by the act of building their own house.

So the question here probably was why doesn’t this idea catch on. Well, if you drive out on Cape Cod to Wellfleet or to Provincetown, I mean, you’ll see hundreds of homes built in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century that are just breathtaking. They weren’t built by architects. And they were built by people who decided, well, if I’ve got some time right here, I’ll build a house.

If you come to where I am over in New York state between Ithaca and Cooperstown, the baseball hall of fame, the new stuff, you know, it’s a quarter million dollars, is all pre-cut lumber and it’s true that you can’t look at it for very long. Nothing is ugly, it’s just not. But these framed places with the turned spindles and the eccentricity are everywhere and they were built by the people who lived in them.

There could we restore, pardon, the Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine, and if you have your house in hand, you can walk down the street and there’s the Maine Boat Building Institute and they’ll teach you how to build a Boston Whaler, a dory and a skiff. You built three boats in eight months. That’s how you learn to do it. That’s not bad, because you walk out of Bath, Maine, with your house on one shore, and there’s three boats over the other, and your total tuition was about $700, $800, something like that, and at the Boat Building Institute, it’s, I think, $800 or $1,000. Come on! Everybody could have these things.

The United States is as close to empty as it’s ever been. When I was a boy, you couldn’t drive anywhere as there weren’t people. You’d go through the Catskill Mountains and there was one homestead next to it, there weren’t any forests. Everybody’s gathered into fifty urban areas now. The country’s emptier than it’s ever been. I’m on 113 acres over in a beautiful area of New York State and anyone here who had a paper round could have bought it. It was $500 down and $90 a month for seven years at six per cent interest. Why was it so cheap? Because nobody wanted to live there. That’s why they wanted to go to the big city, and I don’t know, go on welfare. I don’t know why they want to go to the big city.

But right now as we talk, here’s a project your kids can do. Pick the state, Massachusetts, New York, and send a postcard to every county clerk in every county in the state. So New York is like seventy-five counties, so seventy-five postcards. And ask for the tax sales when they’re posted in the summer. An enormous number of people, and this is hard to believe in the United States, simply get tired of owning something and can’t just walk away from it. That’s one way it gets in tax sales. Another way it gets in tax sales, people die without heirs and they’re too mean to, well, believe it’s anything else. So they go into tax sales. You can buy, virtually at all times, spectacular land. It may not have a hard road, but God knows in this part of the world, it’s stone about a quarter inch down anyway. And it may not have developed water, but that’s not very difficult to get.

I own my land as part of a class session I had where I was trying to show a mixed class which included some poor kids that in a country like this, when people get bored, they give away great value. And I said, for example, if you find areas of the country where land isn’t fashionable, land will be given away or as close to it as possible. So I took a Sunday New York Times classified ads and I just opened it. I said, let’s read down this list. And then about the fourth one I read was, tumbling waterfall retreat, ninety-nine acres more or less, $500 down. And I said, if this was a strip mine, a strip mine would be worth that. And so the kids said, well, if it’s so good, why don’t you buy it? I said, tell you what, I’m going to the payphone right now and tell the guy that I’m gonna buy it, and I called up and I said I’m gonna wire the money up, and they asked me when I was gonna come up to look at it and I said no.

The third and fourth sons who couldn’t, you know, they didn’t get anything. And of course they did horrible things to the Indians but certainly it’s the most potent nation on earth not because of the CIA but because common people were allowed to do very, very uncommon things. The boot was off their neck and they understood that they could feed themselves and clothe themselves and teach themselves to read. This was far and away the most literate nation the world had ever seen.

And Alexis de Tocqueville came here in 1835. He didn’t like a lot of what he saw, but he said there never again can be a theory that says people distribute themselves over a bell curve because the country has contradicted it by the behaviour of these common people.

And even today, there’s no competition against the United States in the world. Japan doesn’t invent anything. Germany doesn’t invent much. This is the source of eighty-two per cent of the patents on the planet are patented here. It’s as if that energy that was loose in the land is still staggering along even when many people want to rein it in. I have enough speeches there.

But are there practically, we’ve got John Bear. I would teach my kids, but I’ve got to step away from this. I would teach my kids the only way anyone knew they were thirteen years old. It’s the way they stood, they smiled too much, they carried a big blocking notebook and all the people still out of town. I said, watch what these naughty Columbia kids do when they come down here. They’ve got a clipboard and they cock it at a drunken angle on their hip. We would go through drills like that.

One of the drills we used was at the Ritz-Carlton auction gallery in New York City, Christie Mansion Woods, which frequently has auctions of really neat stuff like old toys or old comic books, but the kids couldn’t get in. And they said they were prejudiced. And I said, that’s a working hypothesis. I don’t think it’s true, but we can test it. Instead of being strong in front of the client, what happens when you try to get in?

I walk up there and I put the camera on my shoulder and someone says, where are you going? I’m going up to see the economy folks and they said, no kids allowed. Then I take Danny, over there, and see what happens to you. Danny Goites. Danny Goites in fact is a good guy, put his hand on my shoulder and said, where are you going? They said, no kids allowed.

Now we’re gonna run a drill. Walk with a purposeful manner. How do you do this? And then snap around and say, beg your pardon.

They didn’t come back for the rest of the day. That’s me. I’m supposed to ask where young people are going. My mother’s upstairs. I’m meeting her. Is there some objection? And I would drill them so they could say it without a panicking kid screaming in their face. No more problem at all. They get into the Sub-Treasury of New York deliberately. I don’t know if it’s deliberately. Is that where all the money’s burned off? With stacks of gold to the ceiling.

To get in there, you need one teacher for every five students. Well, forget it. Unless you’re a ritzy private school and somebody knows that. But I looked my class over and I could easily pick out six kids who if they carried themselves a different way, we couldn’t tell. And I said, now, what I wanted them all to do was to line up in size order. Ralph, you’re out of line. Check it out. And we would do all these fussy little things teachers did. We were never stopped. Never stopped anywhere. Bronx Zoo is one for fifteen. And I was always one for sixty kids. Never stopped anywhere.

And finally I came to see that we teach kids signs so they can be identified and put back in their place. But to get rid of those signs isn’t a matter of intense study, it’s really a matter of saying, let me show you these passes. That’s what it’s about, it’s a matter of ten minutes or half an hour. It’s a matter of strategy and your people again and not children. You have access to anything.

I had two shy girls ride with a long distance lorry driver down to North Carolina. I dropped them off in the swamps of Secaucus, New Jersey at four in the morning. It was a dense fog. I was scared. I have a picture of them. I think it’s in the newspaper. Just check my newspaper.

This is my very famous life.

Hey, I dropped the march on there. Where?

Well yeah, there they are. First call, it’s a boy. There they are, faces pressed against the window, stood next to it to get what you say. They say, what if this lorry driver doesn’t show up? I say, you’re only running across the river from New York. You’ll catch a bus, you’ll get on the bus, you’ll be in the Port Authority. Then you really have a reason to be scared. It’s only another Port Authority bus, you know. It’s a crazy place. Is it better now? Yeah. I’ve been there for years.

It was something I saw here. These two on page six are worth looking at. This girl Julie was absolutely despicable. She came from a rather sacred background.

I, that someone else got more into her. She came to me and said that she wanted to apprentice with Sue Simmons who was the news anchor, as they called them, in New York City, getting half a million dollars a year and about thirty pounds lighter than she is now. She really was dynamite on Channel 4 in New York City. And she said, I said, boy, that’s a tough one because if they let anybody in there at all, it’s going to be private school kids. I said, but the best way to do it is not to approach the network because they will absolutely say no. It’s to find out where Sue Simmons lives and then to begin leaving little gifts for her. Flowers and brownies, flowers.

And be relentless. Never not have something there every week, you know, and then we’ll soften her up and leave little pathetic notes saying that you want to do a slide sound show of the operation of the NBC newsroom and you want to put it out on the circuit so that every school in Community School District 3, that’s the Upper West Side, will have a copy to refer to the life of a news presenter or whatever. They like this. And one day, just like that, I got a call.

In a voice that was as hard as diamonds, said to me, is this Mr Gatto? Yeah. This is Sue Simmons. You send the little bitch over and I never want to hear from either one of you again.

I told you this is a rotten wretched thing to do to human beings. It’s as bad as building a Beatles memorial in Central Park. Because of the grass you get to walk on and the bronze letters of such Beatle lyrics.

Oh, did it change Julie? The big catch in my class was Danny Sullivan, who was in this newspaper. He was an apprentice to Lieutenant Governor Cuomo. Danny’s a big shaggy Irishman. Of course, he wouldn’t give a ton of attention to somebody like Julie. About three years later, I ran into him on the streets. Julie had utterly changed, not at all the same. She had cut, Danny Sullivan was in college, somewhere here in the college there, I could tell they were definitely an item, you know, from the long haul there, and I didn’t have to ask. Understanding that you have power, that you’re acceptable, it’s magic for kids. You don’t really have to do much after that, they do it for themselves.

Look at Robert Hooper. He was, I think, the most talented actor I ever saw. He ran the tower show, travelling around, and he applied to Performing Arts High School and was turned down on the basis of a four-minute interview and really turned down because he had excessive absences in his junior high. What kind of nonsense is this?

He was in tears when he came here, and he was a pretty tough kid. I said, you don’t have to accept these school restrictions. There are vulnerability laws in the fact that they dictate your future on the basis of two hundred and forty seconds, and thousands of kids are lined up. And therefore to be procedural, that’s all I can manage. But they don’t have a leg to stand on if you challenge their decision on the basis of that. I said, but don’t write a letter to them because I’ll show them the ways back.

I said go out and get a petition with thousands of names on it. Not challenging that you didn’t get in. It’s challenging that the decision is made on the basis of a four minute or two minute interview. Oh, thanks, thank you. And the first person, or a lot of first persons, to sign his petition was Tim Curry who was in the dance show on Broadway. It’s on the west side. And the west side is the bedroom for publishing and television, the theatre, and everything. TV. So anyway, that was the question. And we’re going to challenge the system.

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