Week Two

In the article "Against School", John Taylor Gatto explains the true purpose of the American educational system. He starts out the article by describing the boredom in the school system that he experienced while "[teaching] for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best" (152). He talks about how the system is set up for this and if anyone tries to go against it they get shot down. He gives examples of people who, although unschooled "rose to be admirals like Farrugt; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead" (154).

He then goes on to describe the given goals behind our system, "1. To make good people. 2. To make good citizens. 3. To make each person his or her personal best" (154). Gatto believes that these goals were just propaganda and their where six real goals behind the creation of our educational system that were layed out by Alexander Inglis in his 1918 book The Principles of Secondary Education. The first goal was to create a population that knew how to respond to authority in a docile/compliant manor. The second goal was to create a population of conformists and people that could integrate well into a large labor workforce without needing to be recognized as individuals. The third goal was to track students throughout their educational life to determine later what their role in society would be. The fourth goal was to educate students just in the practices that they would need to fulfill their social roles but not any further. The fifth goal was to eliminate the unfit from the gene pool by placing them into remedial courses and having them rejected by their classmates. The sixth goal was to choose a small amount of children to be in the elite group who would be taught how to control this whole societal system.

Gatto believes that once we can recognize the true purpose of our schools we, as teachers and students, can avoid these pitfalls and traps and succeed in the face of these obstacles.

Question 1 response: Gatto thinks that school is boring and childish because it was designed that way. The second goal I outlined above from the article is about how our school system is supposed to create conformists. An ideal way to do this would be to create a school environment without change or variation which, over time, could lead to boredom in the teaching due to the repetition and thus boredom in the students.

Growing up in Santa Cruz I feel like I never experienced this educational system that Gatto lays out. I went to alternative schools throughout my elementary years and never experienced a formal education until middle school. I went to a college prep school for middle school and high school, and in this system I didn't experience the type of education described in this article either. The teachers I had were very energetic and enthusiastic about teaching, for the most part. They tried to make the content applicable to our daily lives, which worked in some classes better than others. I feel like these teachers were progressive and might have experienced a school system similar to the ones described in this article and were actively trying to teach differently. The school board seemed to encourage teachers to diversify their curriculum and try out new teaching styles every once and a while. I remember I had a teacher in geometry who tried out a new teaching style for his classes that year and, while the intentions were good, it failed miserably. I liked that he was willing to try something new though and that the school encouraged this kind of behavior in their teachers.