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John Taylor Gatto, 65
Author, The Underground History of American Education
New York, NY

The new economy is awash in contradictions, but few are more troubling than this one: At the very moment that brainpower is more important than ever, education seems more backward than ever. We have a new economy but outdated schools.

Out of this disconnect has emerged a quiet grassroots rebellion aimed at reinventing both the form and the function of American education. Charter schools -- publicly funded startup schools that operate mostly free of regulation -- have boomed. In 1992, there was one charter school in the United States. Today, there are more than 2,000. The fastest-growing education movement is homeschooling. Today, roughly 1.5 million children learn at home. Just as Internet startups and free agents rattled big business, charter schools and homeschooling are shaking up "big schoolhouse."

Leading them is John Taylor Gatto, education's most original (and perhaps most controversial) thinker. Gatto earned his reformer's credentials the hard way. For 30 years, he taught English in some of New York City's toughest schools -- and became the East Coast's answer to Jaime Escalante, the East Los Angeles teacher immortalized in the film Stand and Deliver. Gatto was the kind of once-in-a-lifetime teacher who changed lives (hundreds of former students remain in touch with him), even as he outraged administrators. In 1991, he was New York State's Teacher of the Year. Then he quit.

"When I left school teaching, I was blind with rage. I didn't know whose throat to grab first," growls Gatto, whose round face, white hair, and bearish build make him look like the tough brother of TV's Captain Kangaroo. "After a while, I could see that responsibility for education had to be revested in ordinary people."

He began writing essays and articles that recommended a systematic overhaul of learning in America and soon attracted a nearly cultish following among homeschoolers, charter-school advocates, and other education reformers. To many members of that incipient movement, Gatto has become their philosopher king. But Gatto, 65, gives himself a different job title. "I'm a saboteur," he says. "I'm sabotaging the idea that you know best what my family needs."

Schools, he says, are irremediably broken. Built to supply a mass-production economy with a docile workforce, they ask too little of children, and thereby drain youngsters of curiosity and autonomy. Tougher discipline, more standardized tests, longer days, and most other conventional solutions are laughably short of the mark. "We need to kill the poison plant we created," Gatto has written. "School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged." His alternative: to get rid of institutional mass-production schools, allow every imaginable experiment to blossom, make free public libraries universal, and expand hands-on apprenticeships.

Earlier this year, Gatto published a book, The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (Oxford Village Press). Nearly a decade in the making, the enormous volume is a sprawling work of history, political philosophy, and citizen activism. Two major publishers liked the book enough to offer Gatto sizable advances -- on the condition that he trim the pages and mute the language. He refused. So he produced and distributed the book himself, selling 5,000 copies the first week.