Fantastic conversation. I transcribed it:

Interviewer:

"I was looking at these John Taylor Gatto quotes, and I've got another one. It's a little long, but I'm going to read it because I want to get your reaction to it.

'I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 30 years of teaching, schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me, because 1000s of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers, aids and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.'

So how can that be how can individuals be good and the system be rotten?"

Michael Strong:

"So good question.First of all, John Taylor Gatto, essential reading, his "Seven Lesson School Teacher." Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year. Absolutely essential reading for anyone in education, as that quotation is one of my lodestars, absolutely. Going back into how the system can be when you think about it, you've got, first of all, we all know we don't want to work for two bosses or three bosses. Everybody in a school system is working for the school district governed by the school board. They also have State Department of Education rules. They also have federal Department of Education rules, and these rules are not always consistent.

So to start with, we have three different bureaucracies all imposing compliance going back to the school district level. Once I knew a wonderful superintendent, and he said the worst part of the job is he had to hang out with other superintendents, and part of it is there are politicians in charge of bureaucracies. How do you maintain tenure as a superintendent of a school district? You avoid as many controversies as possible, and you basically keep these school board members happy while not making any waves. And so you become an expert in being a politician, enforcing compliance and not doing anything too different. There are superintendents that try to do little innovations, but it's so risky. They're by nature, necessarily risk averse, and you can go down the ranks. So which principles win? Well, compliance is number one. Doing well by kids is number 3, 4, 5, 6,

You know. And again, even teachers. There's a joke that the teachers of the year are the ones that break all the rules. If your job is to teach this curriculum in this manner, in this timeline, it's all about compliance, and everything great in the human history is by creative and entrepreneurial people who have broken rules, who've decided to do what they believe is right or interesting, often with little evidence, often with social pressure against them. That's the whole story of innovation. And so you can look at school as an anti innovation machine. And yet, going back to Gatto's point, everything valuable is created by innovators. And so it filters out anybody who would want to do something differently."