Education In John Taylor Gatto's Against School

In America, an education is no longer considered to be an option but in fact, a necessity. Many are raised to believe in order to ensure a successful future, education is a key component. In fact, there are others who believe that the educations systems we have in place today, actually does more bad than good. There have been many movements that had an idea to insure that students are properly educated and all receive the same form of education but, the institution of these movements may have caused more damage and simply relied on the forcing of educators to produce a group of workers who are unable to consciously think for themselves. Although there is no way of making sure that the potential of a student is fully developed, possible solutions …show more content…
Such ideals are presented in John Taylor Gatto 's "Against School". He argues that the institution of public education hinders creativity and individual ways of thinking, but in turn, creates a more immature society. Gatto believes that the American school system has a very childish program of teaching and learning. He thinks that if you provide children with the autonomy to make their own decisions and allow them to take some risks from time-to-time, you 're able to bring out a child 's finest qualities. In the article, Gatto breaks down Alexander Inglis’s six basic functions of modern schooling. The six functions in the article that help to lay out the role of modern schooling begins with the adjustive or adaptive function which has a goal to inject fixed habits among students. The integrating function has the intention to make students behave, think and act very similar to one-another, while the diagnostic function is used to determine a child’s social role. The differentiating function is there once a social role for a student is determined so, “Children are to be sorted by role and trained only as far as …show more content…
This issue raises the question, "Do we really need schooling?" Gatto answers this question by referencing a few successful Americans who did not attend and go through the school system and in the end turned out very productive and successful. According to him, children in our nation are, "happy to surrender our judgements and wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments" (Gatto 5). When things come fairly easy to us, it removes the need to work on things and ponder upon thoughts the way we should which Gatto believes to be the main problem. His solution would be to have schools train students to be leaders and more adventurous which will allow them to think more independently while challenging the students to poke their brains by taking on more serious material in various fields and subjects. This ideology would go completely against the prison like school systems that we have set in stone in our nation today. It feels like an individual is serving a twelve-year sentence and is unable to get out early and be able to go back to a regular member of society because we are confined only to the knowledge and information that our school systems want us to know. We are molded to conform to societal norms and are unable to branch out to be our own individual leaders. This is similar to the idea of Gatto that, our school systems are fairly similar to that of a Prussian culture