Against School

Against School

The essay “Against School”, by John Taylor Gatto demonstrates that our school system today, as well as ranging as far back as a hundred years ago doesn’t instill the drive, motivation, and passion that make successful, intelligent people. John Gatto has thirty years of experience teaching in public schools and has witnessed just how unproductive schools can be for both students and teachers. Gatto noticed in the classroom that “boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs”(149). He thinks school is boring and childish because that is what he saw as a teacher. Many students in school don’t find school to be interesting because they are forced to know the information which doesn’t make learning enjoyable. The students don’t have any say on what they want to study in school. They are taught standardized information that the government chooses which all students have to learn. There is no freedom to branch away from the raw, watered down information that gets passed through the text books, then restated by the teachers, and eventually through and out the ears of the students. 

So what is the purpose for public education? Gatto believes there are three goals that our public education system strives for; “To make good people, To make good citizens, To make each person his or her personal best”(150). I agree that school makes good citizens, but the other two goals don’t seem realistic. It is up to the individual student to be the best he or she can be and school can only be used as a tool to help the student achieve his or her full potential. School doesn’t make good people. Family values and interactions between different people make people act the way they do. School just tells people if they are good people or bad people, smart people or dumb people.The students who have struggled in school have been sized up, picked apart, and tossed aside for better, more educated students. 

The schooling system has its own way of ranking the students. First there are placement tests that determine which level each student is at, then the students are taught by teachers, and finally are tested to see if they learned the information. “Schools are meant to tag the unfit-with poor grades, remedial placement,and other punishments-clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes”(153). It is unfair that schools only give students one chance to prove their potential and if they get bad grades, they are stuck with bad grades all the way through their educational career. Our system is all about finding the bad students and leaving them in the dirt for the good students to run over.

I am a student and I realized that I have to be ruthless, dominating, and assertive to have a chance against all the millions of other students. Through elementary school and high school, I had passionate teachers that cared a lot about all the students needs. I was lucky to have all the help I got because if I didn’t, I would have been toppled over like many other students that didn’t have good teachers. I can see why many students do bad in school. They don’t have any interest in what the teachers teach them. They are only there because they have to be. I can remember being in class and asking myself, ‘why do I need to know this’? Sometimes I would think that I could learn just as much stuff in a school year in a month if I was at a place that got me really interested in learning. Classrooms seem to suck out all the fun in learning and replace it with uneasiness and boredom. If school was a place that got kids excited and motivated to learn each day, that would be the ultimate formula for producing successful, intelligent human beings.