Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto
Published 2008 · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Education & Reference, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Weapons of Mass Instruction to read?
Weapons of Mass Instruction scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Plain language with occasional historical references.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Historical argument grounded in biographical examples.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Anecdote-heavy with historical research.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Polemical and direct throughout.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Schools as factories. Children as raw material.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Award-winning teacher who denounces the system that awarded him.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Gatto advocates self-education as the clear alternative.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Thematic chapters. Accessible organization.
How Weapons of Mass Instruction is regarded
Weapons of Mass Instruction holds a literary regard score of 34 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.