Author: Kalissa02

The Idea that schooling can make children gullible and mindless doesn’t surprise me. Almost my entire life of being in school, being constantly told  to sit at a desk all day. Being told what to do and what not to by all your teachers every second of the day, than they go home to do more work that they’ve probably already forgotten all the material they learned that day can be really stressful. I know as a child who has grown up like this, this has put a lot of stress on me and my fellow classmates. I’ve never been an A student and sometimes i wasn’t a B student either, i struggled in some areas more than others but i tried about as hard as a child usually does. Which is trying hard once- I fail- and i give up. Meaning that i put effort into once and once i fail i have no motivation to want to try again. And when i did fail most of my teachers growing up never really noticed or some just didn’t care to help. Now i’m not saying every teacher out there is like this, i’ve had many teachers that i looked up too and will forever remember them. But i’ve also had many teachers who just seem like they absolutely hate their job. In Gattos “Against School” he explains it perfectly. “Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kid”. In this quote Gatto is saying that some teachers just seem bored almost like they just don’t want to be there. I believe this so strongly because of seen this first hand from teachers, i’ve had many teachers say “ I’ve already graduated, I don’t care” or “ I don’t care if you don’t want to learn i already got paid”. Again i’m not saying all teachers are like this but hearing this come from a teacher multiples times a day doesn’t motivate a student to want to learn. I mean if the teacher doesn’t even want to be there than why would the students want to.

The idea that going to school five days a week for 8 hours a day for 12 years+ straight doesn’t always guarantee success. What i mean by this is that all our lives we are taught that education is the most important thing which yes essentially it is important, But it always isn’t the case with some people. There are many people in this world that are living proof of that, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg succeeded beyond reach and barely had their foot in the door. Again disclaimer i also don’t believe the same rules apply for everyone obviously, if you want to be a doctor you have to go to school for it there’s no exception. But higher education isn’t for everyone, back in the day around segregation going to university was considered a luxury because the only the rich white people could afford it because there was rarely any colleges accessible for people of color. It’s a beautiful thing that it is accessible in America now as it wasn’t back then, but standards for success is to overwhelming. In 2019 seeking higher education is a necessity to get any job, even Mcdonalds requires some college experience. In Gattos article “Against School” he speaks about how a lot of people have made a name for themselves without being fully educated.  “Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead”. Gatto is saying that all the people he mentioned became successful without having to go to school, that it even was common for most people to not even go to highschool and that was the norm. Gatto even points out that he isn’t fully saying he agrees with no schooling, he just thinks that some people are fully capable of teaching themselves which he explains here “We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves” I fully agree with this statement because yes while education is important not everyone needs to be in school to learn, children being home-schooling is just as affected.

In John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School”  he speaks about how public school is hurting students more than helping. He first starts off by speaking about how teachers are just as bored as students which is part of the problem as to why students are uninterested and don’t see the value of their education. He then goes on the speak about how people like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were all homeschooled and that they seem to all turn out pretty well, as he describes it  “they were not products of the system”. Gatto making this point makes it out to be that the best possible way for students to learn is through homeschooling, he also speaks about how success isn’t just something that comes with schooling. People are fully capable of educating themselves and this can push away that double standard of needing to be in school. Now at this point it seemed to make sense, but after continuing to read the rest of the article It felt like Gatto was going on tangent with his writing and I was getting a bit lost. I appreciate the detail he decided to get into about his extensive research he did for this article, but it was overly saturated with to much background that his main point was becoming lost. His point of view started to regain itself towards the end of the article when he said this “ we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.” I highly agree that school system is like one big experiment and all the students are like lab rats. Gatto came to the ultimate conclusion that people should just manage themselves, which can be a success or can possibly fail. We never know.