Analysis and Reference Summary of “Against School” by John Gatto

Gatto: An aura of paranoia seems to pervade Gatto’s angry, impressioned plea for changes to America’s educational system; as part of his argument, he tries to convince us that we are pawns in a gigantic plot. Gatto identifies with the students whose lives, he believes, have been ruined by some monstrous entity-“corporate society”? ----that tries to grind children down until they become docile, robotic creatures. His presentation-particularly toward the end-is facile and ideological; it can be hard to accept his unexplained, unsupported assertions. For example, is the purpose of tracking students necessarily the elimination of the inferior ones, or can one interpret it as one way of maintaining a meritocracy? A good summary should refer to Gatto’s scattershot method of argument. One might also question the accuracy of his paraphrases. Inglis’s list of educational purposes, for example, might be presented quite differently by a more conservative commentator. It is a loaded topic.

1. Schools are filled with bored students, who find the work dull and repetitive, and bored teachers, who lack the motivation and the knowledge to make the work interesting. Neither students nor teachers know how to think for themselves.
2. America’s educational system is a rigid structure in which schools serve as a prison and a training ground for children.
3. The solution to apathy in the schools is to do away with the structure-schedules, tests, and (one infers) uniform curriculum-and instead provide freedom to explore, with teachers on hand to provide knowledgeable guidance.
4. There are two additional arguments for eliminating structured education: a) many people, past and present, have achieved success without formal education and b) other countries have benefited from more flexible school systems.
5. In theory, our present system of education was devised to effect the moral improvement of everyone in the country, to turn children into good citizens, and to encourage them to fulfill their potential. In fact, the real purpose was to produce a society of obedient, docile, and interchangeable cogs.
6. Gatto suggests-but does not prove-that this system was also intended to discourage working class solidarity and so suppress any threat to the ruling class (whose composition Gatto does not identify). According to Gatto, Alexander Inglis’s 1918 analysis of the goals of the American system includes encouraging robotic behavior, ensuring conformity, tracking children according to their “proper social role,” and limiting their opportunities for success. The object of teacher training was to prepare managers to preside over this repressive process.
7. Ultimately, this form of education produces a manageable, quiescent population of consumers that is interested only in being entertained and in indiscriminately buying whatever products are currently being marketed. By inference, “they”-the people in charge, the capitalist/corporate system-would suffer if children were allowed to become thinking, independent, working adults.
8. To save their children, parents must subvert the system by engaging in a parallel process of education that emphasizes independent thinking, self-knowledge, self-restraint, and hard work.