What would turn this country on its head is a commitment by schools to make room for independent livelihoods of all sorts. I mean that, by and large, you set the terms of your own employment, you decide the relative value of the goals that you're after, you stick your neck out, and you take all of the reward or your neck gets chopped off. That would be a dazzling society. It would be like some of my classes were -- just dazzling.

Is that why homeschooling is booming?

Homeschooling returns the most important responsibility right back to where it belongs: the parent. Do all parents do it better than anyone else? Some do, some don't. But are there any experts whom you can point to who do it better than any homeschooler picked at random? No. What we have is a long succession of expert failures everywhere. Now we have homeschoolers, charter schools, and "unschoolers" -- who mostly let their kids direct their own learning -- doing it however they want. It's the classic contradiction of the principle that interventions are the way to improve a kid's life. Home schools have proven that two hours a day is enough for intense academic work, because the kid's involvement as a principal player is seen as the most important determinant of his future. In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

But the reality is that most Americans lack the time or the gumption to homeschool their children. What's the broader remedy for conventional American schools?

There is no simple formula, but fortunately a crude formula will work to get started. If you cut the guaranteed river of revenue that flows into the monopoly, the problem will solve itself -- quicker in some places than in others. But over time, it will happen. We should break up institutional schools, decertify teaching, and let anyone who has a mind to teach bid for customers. Trust the customers to know if they're being cheated, and then give them a way to try something different.

We would have a much better teaching staff if we waived the requirement of having a college degree and opened the jobs to anyone. We'd have a much better teaching staff if we simply didn't allow anyone under the age of 40 to teach. I would also say that we could draw workers from the retired population of the country much more than we do today.

And you have to trust children more. What if we started from exactly the opposite premise of the Viking conquerors who've now become the Fortune 500? Suppose we began with the idea that almost everyone has superhuman powers to see into a grain of sand and say, "Why, I can scratch little lines on this piece of silicon." I mean, is that an unlikely idea? Is that counterintuitive? "And the pieces of sand can talk to each other across the world, and we can drive Bell Telephone out of business." You'd lock someone up who said that! But that's the thinking that changes the world. We need to start from the cold-blooded premise that almost everyone is a genius -- not that almost everyone is worthless.

Daniel H. Pink (dpink@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor and author of the forthcoming book Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live (Warner Books). To learn more about John Taylor Gatto, visit him on the Web (www.johntaylorgatto.com). For information on the film documentary "The Fourth Purpose," contact Roland Legiardi-Laura by email (roland@echonyc.com).

Sidebar: What's Fast

John Taylor Gatto's most famous essay may well be "The Seven-Lesson School Teacher" (New Society Publishers, 1992). In the essay, he describes -- with considerable irony -- the real lessons that he and other teachers impart to their students.

Confusion. Schools attempt to teach too many things. And they present most of those things out of context, unrelated to everything else that's being taught.

Class position. Students must stay in whatever class they're assigned to and must "endure it like good sports." From that, they learn how "to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes."

Indifference. Children learn not to care about anything too much. When the bell rings, they stop whatever they've been working on and proceed quickly to the next workstation. "They must turn on and off like a light switch.... [T]he lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing."

Emotional dependency. "By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces," kids learn to surrender their will and to depend on authority. Intellectual dependency. "Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do." Conformity triumphs, while curiosity has no place of importance.