Against School By John Taylor Gatto Summary

Countless students and teachers go to school every day and work very hard to meet what is asked of each of them. Teachers work more than 40 hours a week, especially when there are events going on throughout the school year. Students go to class to earn an “A,” not to learn what the teacher is teaching the class due to the fact that students were taught to contently earn a letter grade in that class. However, teachers are not at fault either because the school board and administrators give the teachers a timeline of all the curriculum the students must learn to a certain point in time of each marking period. In “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, he describes how numerous students and teachers go to school and they are just dullness is so …show more content…
When a teacher starts the year, he or she had a timeline of everything that needs to be fit in before a marking period. How well students perform show how well a teacher taught and if he or she had even done their job. Gatto developed a theory that schools are just laboratories on young minds to teach multiple tasks to: “First, though, 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. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants” (Page 5). Having too much information to learn at once does not make it any easier for students to learn. Everyone learns at an own individual pace; some learn extremely fast and others very slow. When teachers are under pressure to cram information, students fall behind and lose interest in the class. Going to class then just becomes boring and uninteresting, only going to get a good grade for the class for their transcript for college. Not only does the amount of pressure that both students and teachers receive from administrations take a toll on both of them, but a number of time students spend in the …show more content…
Gatto proved throughout his paper that a number of hours student spend in the classroom is not necessary nor healthy. Children do not have a very long attention span. As children are growing up, they do not always learn by being spoken to. Going out into the real world, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes is the best way for a student to learn how to manage their life as Gatto had stated: “The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves” (Page 6). If one wants a student to be successful and learn life’s challenges, the wrong way to go about teaching is having a student in the classroom for 40 hours a week. Students are not full-time employees, and their schedules should resemble a college-like