Gatto

Reading “Against School” was somewhat confusing and eventually made me lose interest in reading further. First, I loved how the author was open-minded and discussed if being schooled really was necessary. He justified his statement by providing evidence with famous homeschooled Americans that succeeded although they were not a part of the school system. He then argued further that people tend to correlate being schooled as a guarantor of success but that isn’t the case, which leaves the question “why then do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?”(2)

Now here is where I get confused or more likely start losing interest, as I continue reading along the passage the author starts talking about the history of schooling in the United States and the purpose of the school, which was very obvious, “To make good people, to make good citizens and to make each person his or her personal best”.(2) He continued to talk further in depth about H.L. Mencken the Prussianization of American schools which honestly, made me confused and forget what the main idea or question was, which was “What is the purpose of our public schools?”. He then finally got to the point where a Harvard lecturer named Ingles broke down the real purpose of schooling. I felt that he could have gone to the point by mentioning Ingles sooner than wasting time writing about history.

I understand if his purpose was to probably show where the school system derived from and how it came about but when the author mentioned about James Bryant Conant – “president of Harvard for twenty years, WW I poison-gas specialist, W WII executive on the atomic -bomb project, etc..”(3) I honestly started to get even more confused like who is this guy and is he really important or am I just not reading carefully? There was too much information for me to absorb that I couldn’t narrow down which were the key points and which were not. Personally, it wasn’t that I did not understand the context but more like not being able to grasp every detailed information the author provided thus, making me feel confused.