Gatto Essay Draft

Most of us probably grew up knowing the struggles of waking up early in the morning to go through our same routines day by day for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 10 months a year, for 12 years. This system is known as K-12 or compulsory education/school. In his article “Against School,” John Taylor Gatto argues that the American schooling system is designed to have people grow into mindless, unindependent, and submissive consumers, which to an extent I agree.  He first begins talking about boredom and how students when asked are always claiming that they are “bored”. Somewhere further in the article, his claim on people becoming mindless, submissive consumers can be found stated in the article. Whether this is true or not can be found to be debatable.

In his article he begins with the topic of boredom which is something that I can vouch for when talking about the school system considering all the times that I found myself impulsive and distracted frequently. Gatto being a teacher of 34 years has always occasionally asked his students on why they were “bored” where they replied, “They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around.” In other words, the students willing to put up with the pointless work that they do but still make it clear that they are most aware to the fact that they could be doing something that would make them feel productive. Being that I am one who has partaken and had experience in the k-12 system, like the students I can agree with my disdain for spending so much time learning things that I know will not help prepare me for the future.

Advancing further in the text leads you to where Gatto starts elaborating on the idea that the school system have similar pre-designed experiences for every enrolled student, in which the outcome of their journey will have them be mindless, unindependent consumers. My experience however isn’t all as Gatto makes it out to be where in his article he makes the claim that, “We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgements and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishment that would insult actual adults.” What this essentially means is that Gatto believes that we are a nation grown on children who are willing to leave out the credibility on everything that deems questionable and are also willing to submissively take on political orders upon receiving them. I can not agree with this completely being that I am one who has seen a considerable amount of skepticism on the internet that poke holes in the credibility in nearly everything, and moreover that I can not simply come to agree that I have shared an experience such as the one depicted by Gatto.

In conclusion, most of the ideas that are brought up, along with the claims that Gatto makes are heavily supported in his article with different forms of evidence and texts, however the idea of making claims based on the outcomes of what people’s experience are to be is completely different being that it can go one of two ways. It can either support his claims or hurt them, due to the fact that one is most likely not going to agree with the idea that they are unindependent, mindless and submissive. Overall, perspective plays a huge role in the credibility of claims made like that of Gatto, due to the topic actually being based on the experiences of people which can yes, be similar but are overall going to differ from person to person.