John Taylor Gatto

probably applies only to the USA system (add canada too), since his exposure is to that. Schooling in other places in the world is much different. Having been through german and candian system, i can testify a world of difference. (my sister started at end of high school here in quebec, and with barly any knowledge of french or english, she was MILES ahead of french born students. in a private school)

It's not really what he talks about in the video and I can't explain it as well so, no comment.

his exposure is to the american schooling system, so, alot of the criticism stems from that. for example, he says that "it fills almost all the "free" time of children" which was not true for me when i was in primary schooling in germany since my days were done at 1pm and homework was almost unexistant. that was my point, not really to discredit him nor that his points would not be valid to the rest of the world. i think it's important to be aware what his exposure was to be able to difirentiate and apply his criticisms to the rest of the world schooling systems.

Here in Quebec, we have and are undergoing an educational reform, where things like memorization of information are being questioned, and same with the grading system and a more relative approach is being used.

I don't want to poorly present some of the ideas and information so ill just recommend the video and leave it. I know I sound annoying and it is very hard to get excited about watching a 5 hour talk on this topic but I promise that its not as dull as it sounds and goes into many interesting topics.

I haven't been to public school in Germany and it might be very good in terms of actual learning and developing imagination, life experience etc and not just worrying about memorization, doing tests, but somehow I doubt it.