Gatto

“Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, was boring to me because the article didn’t grab my attention as the reader. The article started off interesting with his teaching experience with boredom and how it is a common condition of school teachers that show they are trapped inside structures.” We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight – simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then”(1), I  agree that learning on our own would give us a risk that would make us push ourselves and be more successful independently. The author started to lose me when he brought up old history facts rather then keep the flow going with his experiences and knowledge of learning don’t get me wrong I love hearing history facts about Prussian, World War 1, World War 2, Karl Marx’s conception, etc. But when I started to read all those old history facts it made me wander off to my ninth-grade global world class where they would just throw facts at you and bore you to death which is the authors point “boredom”. I would be more interested in the author’s beliefs of how we can enhance children’s abilities to acquire knowledge and how we could improve our school system to help the future generations. For the most part, I agree with Gatto argument that schools make children to be employees and consumers and contents that is limited which shouldn’t be.

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