They are considered the smartest and will achieve. Is this true? Children are given a number and ranked, the classes are divided by ability and the 'good kids' get the good grades. This is not the natural progression of things.Ĭlass Position - If you don't study and get good grades, you'll never find a good job. A group of adults, not chosen by the student or the parent, administers jargon and superficiality for hours a day.
The most important of the essays, Gatto explains what school really teaches:Ĭonfusion - school is a mixture of mostly non - related topics, devoid of meaning, grouped under one roof. Gatto's work woke me up about six years ago - I spent a decade in the system, buying the shibboleths fed to me, believing in the system, before I found him. Gatto has a knack for stating what is rightly obvious, yet so politically incorrect that even a School Veteran such as myself might have missed it. Probably because I work in a difficult environment, I spent the entire essay saying 'wow that's right' and 'that's exactly how it goes in my building'. Gatto details the seven things that school actually teaches.
The most potent of the five is the first one, "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher". I have enough faith in American imagination and resourcefulness to believe that at that point we’d come up with a better way - in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.Gatto collects five essays / speeches and collects them in one volume. I can’t help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! I don’t believe that anyone who thinks about that feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn’t any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as “low-class” material. “What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit - and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time.
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