Bartleby Project

The Bartleby Project is an invitation from John Taylor Gatto to 60,000,000 American students who take state exams every year, usually in late April or early May.

First given in his book *Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008). ISBN 0-865716-31-5 , the Bartleby Project is an invitation to an open and non-violent conspiracy to dismantle state testing. According to the project, students are to write "I prefer not to take your test" on the top of the state exam.

Original Idea for the Bartleby Project

The Herman Melville short story, called Bartleby, the Scrivener , is AbOUT a copyist who decided one day to simply say "I prefer not to" when asked to do perform a task. He said "I would prefer not to" when his boss asked him to leave work, and eventually, in prison, he preferred not to eat, and subsequently starved to death. Gatto explains that Bartleby was exercising his basic right not to do something if he chose not to do it.

Multimedia

Writings of John Taylor Gatto

Sources

  • John Taylor Gatto's Website
  • Altruists.org - download audio files of some of Gatto's talks
  • Gatto, John Taylor The Underground History of American Education (2001). (Complete Text online)
  • Gatto, John Taylor Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008). ISBN 0-865716-31-5