The seven-lesson schoolteacher, as John Taylor Gatto simply puts it, teaches school. Despite beliefs and premonitions that children attend schools to learn something, Gatto explains how children are not primarily "acquiring general knowledge" nor are they "developing the powers of reasoning and judgment." This is how The Random House College Dictionary defines education. Instead, the lessons teachers primarily teach children between kindergarten and twelfth grade are confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and one can't hide. However, with intellect guided by M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley's Asking the Right Questions, one may find Gatto's theory to use illusive reasoning and misleading connections.
             Gatto asserts the seven lessons to be an unconscious absorption, a device implemented by the government, who are the real deceivers. A goal declared by the United States Department of Education (U.S.D.E.) is to "promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education" (ed.gov). Contrary to the U.S.D.E. mission statement, what Gatto believes to be the desire of the Unites States Government is "a curriculum [which] produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis...compulsory subordination for all," (Gatto) because a "society essentially under central control...requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling, in order to maintain itself" (Gatto). Gatto believes that "students [should be able to] volunteer for the kind of education that suits them" (Gatto) and instead of the seven lessons students should "learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love – and lessons to service others too" (Gatto). Furthermore, he believes that without these lessons school is just "prime training for permanent u...