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Against School by John Taylor Gatto

            I remember back when I believed that school was meant to be for kids that had to be punished and sent some place other than home. Up to this day, my view on school remains about the same due to the fact that nobody wants to go to school everyday for the rest of their lives for the one reason that we are treated as bad as prisoners. In John Taylor Gatto's article, "Against School," he explains how society is turning students into mindless robots who are basically taught nothing in schools. Instead of being taught skills that will help them in the long run to achieve their full potential, they are just seated and handed work to do or maybe known as "cell block style." Gatto adds that there are "six covert functions" that are basically meant to destroys the lives of kids. Up to this day, society is running schools as if it was a prison and we are the prisoners. He points out that there is good news as well. Modern schooling can easily be avoided by having you teach them. At this point, I agree and can compare with Gatto's point of view on how bad society is treating the rest of the student population. .
             Why do we need school? To excel in things that we love doing to get greater things in life? That's what we are striving for until society gets in the way. Kids in schools are dying of boredom due to the fact that even the teachers have given up in teaching their students. They much rather do hands on learning than doing bookwork about things that they already know how to do. They don't want to be seated and handed work to do so that they can go home and forget about it. The teachers are as bored as the students as well, "bored of reaching students who are rude and interested only in grades." School feels like a prison to them because they are forced to due things they don't want to do but have to in order to get a passing grade. I can compare this to my own experiences because I've always loved hands on work.


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1. The Seven Deadly Lessons

In "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher," a selection out of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling published in 1992, John Taylor Gatto warns against the debilitating curriculum to which America's children are being exposed and the degenerative state it is leaving our nation. The seven lessons Gatto presents are able to elaborate the very ironic, but honest function school has in society. Gatto mentions the lack of wholeness in education. ... Gatto believes that school causes children to rely on external sources for self-validation both emotionally and intellectu...

  • Word Count: 539
  • Approx Pages: 2
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2. Sociology reaction bried

John Taylor Gatto's essay, "Against School: How public education cripples our kids and why" is about the structure of the public educational school system. ... Mencken who wrote that the aim of the public educational school system is not "to fill the young with knowledge and awaken their intelligence (Harper 2001: 35),"" nor was its aim "to make out good people, good citizens, and to make each person his or her personal best (Gatto 2001: 35)." ... Paulo Freire shares very much in the same views as Gatto. ... It is because of this type of teaching that Freire mentions that both student...

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3. The Crutch of Society

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  • Word Count: 310
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4. Boredom in our schools

"What did you learn at school today?" ... John Taylor Gatto discusses this common classroom attitude in his article "Against School." Gatto proposes the question then of who is to blame for the affliction of boredom among teachers and students alike. Gatto answers this with the simple sentence of "We all are." ... In no other schools is this as noticeable as in American public high schools. ...

  • Word Count: 1127
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5. Make Learning the New Cool

In "Idiot Nation," and "Against School," Michael Moore and John Taylor Gatto disagree with the American School System and believe it has set students to fail. ... John Taylor Gatto explains how students want to learn something real, "Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. ... In "Big Ideas for Better Schools: Ten Ways to Improve Education" Edutopia shows us the many ways school and ...

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6. Myths and American Culture

However, as John Taylor Gatto argues, " we have been taught in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling', but historically this isn't true in either an intellectual or financial sense"(144). ... Firmly believing in the myth, people mindlessly go to school, not on their own determination. ... As Gatto highlights, "a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin franklin, ...

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7. The Importance of Teachers in Education

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  • Word Count: 1338
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