Reading Response #4

In “against schools” John Taylor Gatto a retired teacher, who taught in Manhattan’s worst and best school explores the goals and purpose of our public school system. He explains the tricks and traps of modern schooling and how we can avoid them. Gatto claims that these compulsory secondary schools are designed to train students to be employees and consumers. He believes the purpose of public education is to turn students into servant, to obey reflexively, and to seek companionship. However most importantly Gatto believes not only has education turned students into addicts, but it has done a remarkable job of turning children into children. He insists our educational system is deliberately designed to deny students leadership skills and their originality.
Dr. Ingles and Gatto share similar beliers on how education is keeping our children from maturing and growing up into adults. Inglis thought “if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealously, and fear they would grow older but never truly grow up.” He was basically saying that there are many things public education isn’t teaching our students but never growing up are a big one. Both Inglis and Gatto feel that education should help children mature and grow up into adults.
H.L. Mencken and Gatto also share similar beliefs on what the purpose of our public educational system is. In his book “The American Mercury” Mencken writes “that the aim of public education is, not to fill the young of species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. The aim is to simply reduce as many individuals as possible to the save level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry to put down dissent and originality. In other words Mencken believes the educational system is creating students that all inhabit the same negative personality traits making them similar and not original.
For me growing up and being original are two important goals in life. According to Gatto our educational system is doing a good job of ignoring them. In the book “Public Education in the United States” Ellwood P. Cubberley writes that one reason our children are still children is the “successive school enlargements has extended childhood by two to six years. Basically he means that these large public educational systems that “ware house” 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time are delaying the time we have to grow up due to such large number of students.
I feel that school is teaching everyone the same material. We go to the same school, same class, and same teachers every day. Schools tell you what they want you to learn not what you are interested in or what you want to learn. I see no room or opportunities to take a class based on what you’re passionate about. If everyone around you is learning the same material how do we differ? How are we going to be original if everyone goes through the same boring system? So I would have to agree that not only are public education systems create children and not adults they also limit our ability to be original based on my experiences at Ferndale High School.