J. Negraval, Ed.D.

NJ created a civics mandate... then put it in the least effective place imaginable: middle school.

Yes.... Yet people are making millions pedaling answers with a lot of this ridiculous research.

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Upon receiving the award, he quit and spent the rest of his life writing devastating critiques of the educational system he had mastered. Gatto argued that regardless of the official curriculum, schools actually teach seven hidden lessons. The first is confusion. Students learn disconnected facts across dozens of subjects with no integration or meaning. The second is class position. Students learn their place in the social hierarchy. The third is indifference. Students learn that nothing is worth finishing because the bell always rings. The fourth is emotional dependency. Students learn to surrender their will to a chain of command. The fifth is intellectual dependency. Students learn to wait for experts to tell them what to think. The sixth is provisional self-esteem. Students learn that their worth depends on expert evaluation. The seventh is that they are always being watched and have no privacy. These lessons, Gatto argued, are the actual function of schooling. The explicit curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost incidental. The real purpose is to produce passive, dependent, compliant citizens who wait for authorities to tell them what to do and think. Trad schooling amounts to thirteen years of training in being passive and dependent. I have seen this play out with hundreds of students. When I created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, about half the students came up through Montessori elementary and about half came from public schools. When we opened, the Montessori kids immediately began doing their work, taking initiative, choosing what to tackle first. The public school students were lost. They would stare at their desks until we walked over and helped them plan their morning. It took at least a semester, sometimes a full year, before they could function in an environment that asked them to direct their own learning. These were not less intelligent children. They had simply been trained differently. For years, someone else had made all the decisions about what they would do, when they would do it, and how they would do it. When that structure was removed, they did not know how to operate. Agency is natural to children unless we train it out of them. When I coach parents on evaluating their children's education, I tell them to ignore grades entirely. The question is whether their children are taking initiative, being responsible, and becoming empowered moral beings. If a child is getting straight A's but has no initiative and no sense of personal responsibility, that child is being damaged by their education regardless of how it looks on paper.

What's funny is I've been in contact with loads of former students who believe our AP classes are actually tougher then many of these 101 level Student Mills.

It's also entirely possible that as a society we have moved on from traditional school.

Nonsense. Leave it to school to believe that the way forward is backwards.

The CEO of Palantir just said the quiet part out loud. Alex Karp — whose company builds surveillance and defense technology for the U.S. government — just openly stated that AI will deliberately shift economic power away from highly educated, often female, Democratic-leaning workers and toward vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters. He then admitted these technologies are — his word — “dangerous” and “suicidal,” and that the only justification for deploying them is the military argument: if we don’t, our adversaries will. So let’s be clear about what was just said on the record: A defense contractor CEO told you AI is being built to restructure the American class system, that it will destroy the economic power of an entire political demographic, and that the only way to sell it to the public is to wrap it in national security.

@edudissenter No, the worst of ed leadership killed the art in many places. But it's coming back. It's just competing amongst many other learning opportunities.

@negsclass I’ve never heard anything positive said about lecture from the education establishment.

Still shocks me how much education policy revolves around "They made me do this stupid thing as a kid... And kids should do this stupid thing now."

@edudissenter No one debates the value of a good lecture, especially for those willing to listen. But it's 2026 and traditional school no longer has a monopoly on information or learning.

@negsclass I gained so much from my lecture based HS history classes. Especially a course on the Soviet Union. The inquiry group work that goes on today add vastly less value.

@ModestTeacher There are better and worse times to go. But normalizing "no" is a ridiculous policy.

We have to normalize telling kids “no” when they ask to use the bathroom during class

@Catlin_Tucker It's actually being trained to do all those things. Public education will not survive with our heads in the sand.

AI doesn't read between the lines. It can't pick up on tone, & it won't ask what you actually meant. That's why teaching students to communicate clearly IS AI literacy. 💡 The stronger the input, the stronger the output: bit.ly/4qWeNfC #AIinEducation #K12

More like: "How do we sell these to schools??"

Here's a: By the time they graduate high school, students should be able to learn practically anything, outside of the system, on their own.

This may be true for math or reading... But I believe the opposite is true for social studies. Everyone should be in the same class having the same conversations about the issues that affect their communities.

Don't question the system.

We are in an era of “pedagogical clutter.” There’s a surplus of methods, practices, and acronyms to learn—and administrations are in a hurry to implement them.  Teachers are constantly cramming new info, and retaining little.  Let’s slow down, simplify, and focus.

We’ve known this for decades yet there is an overwhelming refusal to put more recess or physical fitness into the school day.

The highest order of school is to help students make sense of their world. The worst thing we can do is block out the world.

These School Leaders Don’t Want a Statewide Cellphone Ban. Here's Why edweek.org/technology/the…