John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state's education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned. The claims that John Taylor Gatto makes are much worse than that they're defaulting to the teacher's password. You have no idea. Consider this: You obviously value rational thought. Learning about things like logical fallacies and biases is a no-brainer to you, right? Why are so many people learning them here, at LessWrong, for the first time? From what I know of American public schools, most of them don't teach these. What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought? Ask yourself this:

If you were making the curriculum, and you knew the kids would be turned lose into the world complete with the right to vote at 18 would you find any excuse good enough to let them out with no familiarity of logical fallacies, biases, etc.?

If your answer to this is "no" you already know that something is wrong.

I have a radar for conspiracy theories too, but what he explains in The Seven Lesson School Teacher (in the first chapter of his book "Dumbing us Down") got past my conspiracy theory radar and made it to "oh crap". If you want to fast forward past the pretty obvious stuff, start at #3 in that link, and if you want to begin with "oh crap" start with #4.

I have no idea if his claim that the American school system was based on the Prussian school system in order to create obedient soldiers is correct, or whether seeing the effects of schooling as intentional is just a matter of seeing agency where there is none due to bias. However, the problems he describes are worth consideration. That, I'm sure of.