John Gatto's Essay 'Public Schools: A Closer Look'

674 Words3 Pages
Kevin Howell D. Williamson English Comp.1113 September 12, 2012 “Public Schools… A Closer Look” In the essay written by John Taylor Gatto, the author takes a searing stance against the public school system, as we know it, in America. Being a teacher himself for some 30 years himself, he cites that one of the main reasons schools don’t work anymore is boredom. He asserts questions that make you take a step back and look at the traditional way kids are taught. “Do we really need school? Six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years; is this really necessary?” He goes on and on by citing examples of great men and women who found great success in life without…show more content…
But I think, if people could be extraordinary on a regular basis, he wouldn’t have any examples. We would all be free thinkers in our own right and wouldn’t need schooling. He gives examples of ideas for solving these issues, such as,”… encouraging the best qualities of youthfulness—curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight.” I think at times it almost sounds like he’s just advocating letting children run care free. Don’t worry about the future, just be who you are and develop at your God given ability level. He also refers to public education as being, “Mass schooling of a compulsory nature…” citing it would 1) Make people good. 2) Make good citizens. 3) Make each person his or her personal best. I think that idea accurately carried out and followed through is a brilliant concept. But it’s just not reality with our school systems today. He states that we don’t need Marxism as a conception of grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. I agree with this statement. To compare Marxism to the public school system in America today is absurd. The public school systems today do not dumb people down, they do not demoralize them, and they do not discard them if they do not

More about John Gatto's Essay 'Public Schools: A Closer Look'

Open Document