John Taylor Gatto is an award winning educator who has taught in New York public schools for over twenty years. Three separate times he was named New York City teacher of the year, and in 1991 was named New York State teacher of the year. He also has written such works as: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, A Different Kind of Teacher, The Underground History of American Education, and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. In Gatto’s article from Harper’s magazine in 2006 entitled “Against School”, Gatto argues that the “real purpose of mandatory education is to turn children into servants.”(155) Gatto first begins his article by talking about boredom.
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Often times today there are three main points that are given: “to make good people, to make good citizens, to make each person his or her personal best.” The problem is that most school fail at achieving these. But this is still wrong. In his article Gatto quotes H. L. Mencken from The American Mercury “the aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”(151) Gatto then talks about how Mencken’s article discusses that our current school system is based on the military state of Prussia. How we adapted one of the “worst aspects of Prussia culture: an educational system deliberately designed to 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”.”(151-152) Gatto elaborates further with the topic using James Conant’s essay The Child, the Parent, and the State in which he discourses that a “revolution” took place between 1905 and 1930 within our schools, and directs to Alexander Inglis’ book titled Principles of Secondary Education. Inglis talks about how the system of education on this continent is meant to be what it had been to 1820’s Prussia, a way of dividing the proletarians. Dividing children by grades, age and …show more content…
Men like George Peabody, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, understood that a system like this would create not only a harmless electorate but also a servile labor force and a herd of mindless consumers. (153)
Gatto shows that we don’t need Karl Marx to explain the warfare between classes and how political and economic management benefits by dumbing people down, dividing them and demoralizing them. In an economy of mass production that favors the large company or corporation, a vast amount of heedless consumers is necessary. Mandatory schooling is exactly what was needed for this purpose. “School didn’t need to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something better: it encouraged them to not think at all.”(154)
There are two groups that can easily be encouraged to consume: addicts and children, and school has done a superb job of turning children into addicts. Thinkers from Plato to Inglis have known that if children are packed together, without responsibility and allowed to have emotions like: greed, anger, jealousy and fear they would never truly grow up. That’s something that the system needs. It can’t have children grow up and think. It can’t have them mature. So many thinks have been done to make things easier so that people don’t have to think. Easy credit, easy entertainment, and easy answers; they all make it so we don’t have to think.
Often times today there are three main points that are given: “to make good people, to make good citizens, to make each person his or her personal best.” The problem is that most school fail at achieving these. But this is still wrong. In his article Gatto quotes H. L. Mencken from The American Mercury “the aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”(151) Gatto then talks about how Mencken’s article discusses that our current school system is based on the military state of Prussia. How we adapted one of the “worst aspects of Prussia culture: an educational system deliberately designed to 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”.”(151-152) Gatto elaborates further with the topic using James Conant’s essay The Child, the Parent, and the State in which he discourses that a “revolution” took place between 1905 and 1930 within our schools, and directs to Alexander Inglis’ book titled Principles of Secondary Education. Inglis talks about how the system of education on this continent is meant to be what it had been to 1820’s Prussia, a way of dividing the proletarians. Dividing children by grades, age and …show more content…
Men like George Peabody, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, understood that a system like this would create not only a harmless electorate but also a servile labor force and a herd of mindless consumers. (153)
Gatto shows that we don’t need Karl Marx to explain the warfare between classes and how political and economic management benefits by dumbing people down, dividing them and demoralizing them. In an economy of mass production that favors the large company or corporation, a vast amount of heedless consumers is necessary. Mandatory schooling is exactly what was needed for this purpose. “School didn’t need to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something better: it encouraged them to not think at all.”(154)
There are two groups that can easily be encouraged to consume: addicts and children, and school has done a superb job of turning children into addicts. Thinkers from Plato to Inglis have known that if children are packed together, without responsibility and allowed to have emotions like: greed, anger, jealousy and fear they would never truly grow up. That’s something that the system needs. It can’t have children grow up and think. It can’t have them mature. So many thinks have been done to make things easier so that people don’t have to think. Easy credit, easy entertainment, and easy answers; they all make it so we don’t have to think.