RR #1

In “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, he argues that schooling the way it is today is not progressive. It is based upon the military state of Prussia, which as Gatoo states is “ An educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills. And to ensure docile and incomplete citizens- all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’.” He Brings in Alexander Inglis’s idea of the six “actual purposes” of modern schooling: “Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority… make children as alike as possible…to determine each students proper social role… to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits… meant to tag the unfit… and a fractions of the kids will quietly be taught to hot manage this continuing project.” Based on these two ideas is why Gatto believes that school is keeping kids immature and dumbed down. He doesn’t believe in schooling, but he believes in being actually educated by challenging kids’ with “‘grown up material’ such as history, literature, philosophy music, art, economics, theology and solitude.” He points out that extremely successful people in American history did not go through our modern schooling therefore proving that it is not necessarily the right and only way to educate children.

To a certain extent, I do have to agree with Gatto that we don’t really need to go to school. I like the idea of parents or whomever it may be having the time and resources to challenge their kids with “grown up material”. However, I don’t know how realistic that really is. How is a parent supposed to encourage children to not be bored while encouraging solitude at the same time?  Now days especially with all the social media, texting and advancing technology, kids are adapting the way they live their lives. Realistically, if a child has a choice between going and hanging out with their friends or do what their parents encourage them to do: to study “grown up” dense literature and theology, what do you think they’re going to pick?

 While Gatto seems to have a lot of ethos and a very credible source (having been a teacher for decades) he throws a lot of over-generalized claims about kids and the school system. Saying things like “Mandatory educations’ real purpose is to turn them [kids] into servants” and “we have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults” and putting down society by saying “ it is in the interest of complex management to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another and to discard them if they don’t conform” can make people lose some respect for him. Having such cynical and pessimistic things to say about our generation and our society does not make me want to listen to what he has to say. While a lot of what he says does have some truth in it, his overbearing, sullen and dark way of approaching the matter brings down his ethos.