320 hours per year of community service

Adapted extract from an article entitled 'Why Schools Don't Educate', by John Gatto, published in the Sun, USA, and monitored for the Institute by Roger Knights.

What does a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. It is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility.

'I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give three hundred and twenty hours a year of hard community service'

For five years I ran a guerrilla school programme where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give three hundred and twenty hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, and told me that this one experience changed their lives, taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School programme - only made possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When 'stability' returned, the Lab closed. It was too successful, at too small a cost, to be allowed to continue. We made the expensive, elite programmes look bad.

There is no shortage of real problems in this city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the adult world. Good for kids, good for the rest of us.

Community service, independent study, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, family involvement in the curriculum - these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling.

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