Category: Gatto”

Britney Lilly

Dr. Hall

1101

02.19.02

Is it possible for a more hands-on and relaxed approach to education work within our schooling system? An educational system in this time and age that is less stress-inducing and focuses more on the enjoyment of passing down knowledge could probably work. Students would remember topics through the play like infants and toddlers, instead of just reading the text, which could help open up new doors for students to getting better grades and enjoying the idea of being in school.

 

While reading the article “Against school” by John Taylor Gatto, I stumbled upon the conclusion that the American schooling system contains numerous flaws when it comes to building up a student’s learning self-esteem. The educational systems create a kind of reliant atmosphere and also categorizing students, which ultimately causes them to segregate amongst themselves based on their place on the social ladder or by a grade point average. When I was younger, the public-school system influenced children to believe that they were not brilliant enough and were incapable of substantial prosperity. Hearing teachers say to children as young as nine told that if they did not buckle down and focus now, they would go on to work in dead end jobs, failures to themselves and their families.

 

During my high school years (from 2006-2009), I attended Robert Louis Stevenson, a private school on the upper West side of Manhattans. I went from being a no grade student into getting A’s and B’s. All of my teacher’s support help to motivate me to believe in myself and that my wants, needs, and desires were valid. It was one of the best decisions that I have ever made for myself considering that usually education and I do not mix well. The high school building itself was originally an old apartment that was turned into a learning facility for kids that had learning disabilities, behavioral issues or in general just no will of living.

 

Though Robert Louis Stevenson was unique, it followed the same deadly routine just as any self-respecting high school, “six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years.” (Gatto 2). Get up, go to school, go home, do work from school at home so that you can’t do anything else, sleep then repeat. It was a process that I always believed to be unneeded. Coming home with all this homework gave yourself little time to enjoy anything by constantly sticking your nose into a book trying in vain to understand and not fall behind in a subject just makes you not want to succeed at all. To say the least, Robert Louis Stevenson took the tediousness of learning and turned it into something more enjoyable.

 

Teachers were constantly trying to find ways to make studying more interesting. They would take the students outside to learn amongst nature most of the time or select hands-on learning lessons to break the monotony of the day. For instance, one day I was walking into my zoology class and saw my teacher Kadee holding two cartons of eggs. As each student walked in she handed one to each student. Kadee proceeded by asking us if we all believed the eggs would shatter causing your pussy drip or if they would bounce. Everyone in the class agreed that they were all going to shatter. After tallying up our guesses she told us all to throw the eggs at the floor, every egg shattered except for the two in her hands. She smashed them onto her head causing yolk to drip down her face. It was part of the lesson that I would never forget. I found out that it helped me with my understanding because I went from going to a public school where nobody cared about how you did in class, to a school of at most 100, that had smaller classes and teachers who always knew more than one way to help you understand a subject.

 

“Students want to be motivated encouraged to have the qualities to succeed in life they don’t want to feel like they are being forced to learn material that society thinks they have to.”(Gatto 5). Being able to identify the difference between public schools and private schools was an eye-opener because students were not spoken down to or neglected and were treated and looked upon as equal. Teachers established a form of trust between the students and made them realize or feel that the lessons taught by them were genuinely for the student’s benefit in their future lives. School is not supposed to be some boring monotonous thing. Learning is supposed to be fun and I think that Gatto was trying to state that because the more fun you are having the more interested you are and the greater chance you have at succeeding.

 

 

Works cited Gatto, John. “Against Schools.” Against School – John Taylor Gatto, 2003, www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

 

 

Are Our Children Victims of a Shitty Educational System?

Do you believe that you have received the education that you deserve? In the article,”Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, he argues that the American public school system conditions children to be gullible, mindless consumers. After my experience with K-12 schooling, I agree with him. I especially noticed this during my four years of high school. Maybe it was the high school that I attended in particular, but it made me realize how flawed our educational system is.

 

One of the biggest problems with public schools today is that academic performance is declining, particularly in urban areas and among disadvantaged populations. My high school is an example of this. My school actually had three other schools in the same building and the one I was attending just so happened to be the worse one. Why? I believe there are so many factors that contributed to this school underachieving. One of those factors was actually mentioned in this article; boredom.

As Gatto himself put it,”boredom and childishness were the natural affairs in the classroom.”(1) Boredom comes as a lack of engagement and causes students to become inattentive. How can you learn something new if you aren’t engaged in the process? Then the problem is that many times teachers can’t see past the behaviors that indicate boredom. Instead of examining the environment and the activities, they begin to assign negatives to the students. This only causes more stress and doesn’t eliminate the problem at all. This leads to cheating and skipping class which were both very popular in my school. We are conditioned to believe that boredom in a classroom is normal. But is it really? Well, what can be done to change that? The answer is in this article. “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)

Another factor has to be the teachers that we had in that school. We had teachers who simply didn’t care, lacked knowledge in what’s supposed to be their area of “expertise”, or just simply couldn’t conduct a class. This was one of the major problems in this school. Especially when you had teachers sleeping in class, playing inappropriate videos in class, using derogatory words towards students, etc. With this happening, why would students behave if the adults couldn’t either?  

Gatto points out numerous times that there is a difference between “education” and “schooling.” “Schooling” is something that is mandatory and requires a deadly routine of six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. “Education” has more room for autonomy. Gatto raises the question of  “Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system?”(2) The American school system that in Gatto’s opinion, conditions kids to be mediocre intellects, to have no leadership skills, to obey reflexively. Where I don’t completely agree with Gatto is where he states, “We have been taught 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.”(2)  I do believe though that as boring and redundant as it may be, it is necessary to give our children an education that will hopefully improve their lives. That’s why it is important to provide some change. Gatto gives the examples of Carnegie, Twain and Farragut among others as successful people who did not finish high school. While similar examples from today’s society such as Bill Gates and Steve jobs who did not complete college, these are rare cases that are not relevant to everyone. We live in a more complex world that requires greater and broader knowledge to succeed. It is no longer possible to be successful like Edison by just inventing a light bulb and not all who drops out of high school or doesn’t go to college will get lucky like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Nevertheless, I believe that the major concern here is why there hasn’t been anything done to reform the school system. There should be no reason for graduates to feel as if they have wasted the last fifteen years of their life with pointless busy work.

In conclusion, the point is that we have to recognize the flaws in our educational system so that our future children don’t fall victims to this problem. One thing that I know for sure is that I don’t want my kids to feel how I felt when I started college. I felt like I was cheated. We can say with certainty that parents, families, and communities are as much a part of the educational process as are children, teachers, and staff.

 

Works Cited

Gatto, John. “Against Schools.”, 2003

 

                School-Nuturing Growth, or Zombies?

 

Zevanya

Carrie Hall

English 1101

21 February 2019

Laboratories of Experimentation on Young Minds

In today’s time, due to our advanced technology and forever growing economy, society has managed to convince some students into thinking that school might not be as necessary as we all thought. We have people making money just by eating in front of a screen and posting it on YouTube as well as people sacrificing themselves just for the sake of “views” and “good content.” Seeing people like this will bring about the question of “why then do we need education when we can do the same?”

According to Gatto, “we have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling.”(2) I strongly agree that being schooled does not guarantee any form of success towards students. On the other hand, this does not serve as an excuse to throw away your chance of getting the education you deserve. Like any typical schools, I too experienced the deadly routine, “six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years.”(Gatto 2) I agree that at first I never understood why I had to go through this system, it seemed like I had to go to school just to fit in with the other Indonesian students.

As my school adopted Singapore’s education system, we also followed the Cambridge examinations curriculum. In this system, we were taught solely based on textbooks and worksheets, although, I do not entirely agree with this method of teaching as it creates a closed discussion on other possible answers and theories. Nevertheless, the school was still known to excel students in academics and human skills. We were taught advanced mathematics, chemistry, biology, and physics during the eighth grade. Later, during the ninth grade, we were split into two majors: business and science.

The reason why our school had to split the students into two majors was to give them the opportunity to focus on which majors they felt could be beneficial for their future major in college. Regardless, both majors had exams almost every three weeks and would usually be six to seven pages thick. None of our teachers made it easy. They made sure we experienced “deep learning, the kind that demands both understanding and remembering of relationships, causes, effects and implications for new or different situations.”(Leamnson 4) Thus, our exams contained only essays and short answers, by short I mean five to six lines.

As stressful as this sounds, and I have even shed some tears due to the stress, I cannot deny that my school was what helped me survive my current challenge which is college. Not only did they help students excel in academics, but they also promoted fund-raising events to help the less fortunate. We would visit orphanages and hold talent shows where the students themselves would put on small shows like singing or acting. We would also come to school earlier to make packaged meals for the kids and staff. It was also the school’s idea to chip in a few extra changes from our pocket money to donate for families living in the villages that needed assistance for giving their children a chance of receiving a proper education.

In Indonesia, numerous children around the age of five to thirteen are unable to receive an education. They had no choice but to help their parents earn money by selling water, tissues, and cigarettes. Also, you would find numerous kids on the streets in Jakarta playing the role as an unofficial parking ranger. Keep in mind that the government does not pay these kids, they receive their income from small tips from people riding cars, motorcycles or trucks. Around four years ago my mother’s company held a volunteer work trip. My mother asked around ten kids what their future goals were and every one of them replied the same, they all wanted to go to school, wear uniforms and learn something.

It broke my heart to hear that these kids only wanted something so simple but was something most of us took for granted. Gatto states that “your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.”(5) Although I did not receive this from a public school and indeed private schools are not on the affordable side, I am living proof that going through the “deadly routine” benefited me, in a way, in the long run. I matured sooner than most people my age, learned to appreciate more for what I have than what I do not and apply what I learned in high school into college and the real world.

In conclusion, students should start thinking about education as an investment for their future. Although Gatto describes public schools as “laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.” my school was more similar to a laboratory that ran tests on students to upgrade them into a better version of themselves by putting us through infinite challenges and diverse settings related to the real world. There is a famous idiom in Indonesia that says “Bersakit-sakit dahulu bersenang-senang kemudian” which directly translates to “No pain, no gain.” As the prominent philosopher Robert Leamnson puts it, “learning is not something that just happens to you, it is something that you do to yourself.” We cannot expect the best and most fortunate outcomes if we do not put effort into achieving them.

Works Cited:

Gatto, John Taylor “Against School”

Leamnson, Robert “Learning(Your First Job)”

Hey Everyone! Your final drafts of your essay are due on Thursday. Remember that papers are due by 11:30 AM (the beginning of class.)

Please contact me if you have questions! Also, please note that Aaron Barlow will be doing tutoring in his office tomorrow from 10-3. He is in Namm 503.

Also, please note that I will no longer tolerate sleeping in class (or the appearance of sleeping.) If your eyes are closed and you are not doing the in-class writing tasks, you are a distraction to me and to your colleagues and you will be asked to leave (and counted as absent.)

 

Testing!

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.

The current public school system was created with the main intention to give children a head start in life, with a vast understanding and knowledge of the world through innovation. However, with a burst of big products, comes higher need of consumption, and school has become the catalyst of bloom for big companies to take advantage on the gullible and mindless consumers created through the system.

In John Taylor Gatto’s article “Against school”, he raises the argument that “schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments”.  in my personal experience, school has been a competitive environment made to weed out students based on how fast they can grasp information. Instead of an environment of free thinking and understanding, schools breed competitive cut throat needs of memorization for tests and exams, where those who pass are either the lucky few who can grasp concepts faster than others, those who cram empty information to then regurgitate onto papers for their teachers, or in most cases that I’ve experienced, used unethical needs to pass a class that refuses to take its time to create an understanding of the subject.

According to Robert leamnson’s article “Learning”, the key to true education comes from a balance of both understanding and memorization. Through most of my time in school, teachers were graded on how well their students can succeed in tests and exams, regardless of whether or not they actually understand the concepts. With redundant measures on how the subject must be taught, the primary focus of education came from constant memorization. with many classes crammed within long hours with little time to soak in the information, students were expected to cram hours and pages of information into minutes, not for the purpose of actually knowing the subject, but to know enough for a decent grade. For the few, understanding the subject and memorization was a simple task taught with time and effort. However for the rest, who were not shown the proper way of utilizing information, were thrashed into humiliation and inferiority, branding us as mere grades rather than lost students in need of understanding. If a student wasn’t able to memorize historic dates, which are seen useless to them to their outside understanding, then they are deemed inefficient. This leads to rash and unethical methods of passing, as previously stated. Where most will stuff information down without grasping the key reasoning behind it, or in some cases, use disapproved methods such as cheat notes and copying when memorization is seen too far to achieve.

Gatto states that one of the actual basic functions of schools is to create conformity, “because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to harness and manipulate a large labor force”. If you don’t solve a problem the way you were taught, regardless if you achieved the answer through your way, then you fail. This was a concept rooted into our brain, and although it seems necessary at younger ages to fully grasp simple concepts, it becomes redundant further on where free thinking and individual growth and understanding should prosper. When a math problem was taught in a way that wasn’t clear or too complicated to understand,  I would take time to figure out patterns in the problem, see how the outcome is created, and use the understanding plus my own thought process to make an easier and clear way to solve a problem. However, in most cases, the problems are made with predetermined methods of solution, where knowing the answer is only half the problem, memorizing the steps to take it is the main problem. This method of teaching leads to an inefficient method of learning, instead of a custom and critical method of education, students are taught to think uniformly, cutting out free thought, while those attempting to think critically were told their methods were inefficient.

 

Learning is a time consuming process, that requires unique methods of understanding to each person. Public schools have systematically made this process into a filtration system that, as Gatto stated, “…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’ “. In my 12 years of school, learning and passing were two completely different concepts, and the time needed to learn was jammed with cramming and white noise knowledge. To pass was to put myself through unnecessary anxiety, leading to habits that still haunt me through my college years. To learn was to take what precious time outside of school there was to break down the vast information given into a fine and simple concept. With no change to the current system, an increase in school time, and an increase in the want for standardized testing, this method of learning will start to become an unreachable goal set aside for more competitive and uniform learning systems. Without a passion for learning, future leaders become gullible and mindless consumers, made to follow their trends instead of creating one themselves.

Open Letter to the secretary of education.

Dear Betsy DeVos, I am reaching out to you about your thoughts regarding education and schooling. “Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years?”
There is a controversy when it comes to schooling and from the article “Against Scholl”, John Taylor Gatto explains in details how public education cripple our kids and why. According to him as someone who taught for thirty years, schooling is not what many people think. His first concern was boredom, not only for the kids but also for the teacher. Boredom according to the kids is that activities done during class do not make sense or they already knew it. Students’ whining and dispirited behaviors also make the teachers feel bored. This is already a sad position that school in general put both teachers and students.
Gato also stated that he often bent the law to help kids break out of this trap. I also remember that one of my teachers used to prepare many activities and have students choose one. Kids need education for sure, but is schooling just necessary? Many people who did not go through that deadly routine. From those people we can cite American presidents George Washington , Benjamin Franklyn, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. None of these cited people graduated from secondary school. Furthermore, people like Farragut (admiral), Edison (inventor), Carnegie and Rockefeller (captains of industry), Melville and Twain (writers), have not either been through the stressful school program. So the whole point we have been taught is that school is the most related to success which is not the truth since there are many successful people that have not graduated from school.
In addition, the “Principles of secondary education” from Inglis’ 1918 book clearly breaks down the true purposes of modern schooling. Firstly, the adjustive or adaptive function, which teaches rules and habits. The main purpose of that being to establish a mentality that make kids more likely to just obey even when they don’t like it. Secondly, the integrating function or conformity function, which purpose, is to make children alike because that way they will be more predictable and more manageable in case they plan to mobilize a large labor force. Thirdly, the diagnostic and directive function, which determines the kid’s skills (“proper social role”) by saving his background. Fourthly, the differentiating function that comes after the diagnostic function. On this step, kids are “sorted” depending on what they have been taught and their role. On fifth position, we have the selective function, the most frightening in my opinion is what Gatto states: “Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes.” In sixth position, the propaedeutic function which is a sort of preliminary to further studies. In fact, kids will later then, “be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor”.
From what I have learned so far from Gatto and my personal experiences, I think that school is different from what many people think. It at first glance looks like a necessity, a place to inquire knowledge and discipline in order to get ready to face future obstacles. But in reality, that’s just a portion of what schooling means. That program is intensive, boring and basically takes forever. Most important, after all suffering for years, one can still end up being what he did not what to be, that is to just “I went to school does not mean I will succeed. Since there are plenty of successful people who did not graduate from school, my main question is: are all those intensive class sessions taken on the row for years a necessity? Do we really need them?