Summary of “Against School”

Summary of “Against School”

From John Taylor Gatto’s points of view, he believes that the staying in the American schooling system for so long has supplied him with every reason to refer to it as a childish program. He supposes he can bring out the best qualities in children by giving them autonomy to make decisions and take risks from time to time, rather than confining them to schooling. According to him, people may see the key problem of schooling as boredom which he argues as not only a problem but can also be the question, “Do we really need schooling?” To clarify his point, Gatto asserts having education is not equal to taking schooling which is instead considered as “a daily routine in a factory of childishness in order to make sure children do not really grow up.” Gatto supports his views by enumerating a significant number of successful Americans who did not go through the schooling system but turned out to be productive, such as Abraham Lincoln. He regards education as the process to enhance children’s abilities to acquire knowledge but not to be schooled and further clarifies that success does not derive from dead cultivation. As far as he is concerned, the main reasons for the existence of schooling consist in that it trains standardized citizenry which in fact would reduce people to the same safe level and put down their originality. Additionally, after further discovery, Gatto believes the schooling system is still made for certain profits to the economy because it encourages obedience to the authority and likeness in children’s attitudes to promote manipulation, which however, inclines determining of their social roles, training of the roles, then selecting of the best, and finally creating an elite group to take over certain systems. In his opinion, all of these are in interest to a social, economic and political economy; our children are continually being fed with both necessary and unnecessary information and they are actually not thinking by themselves. Taken as addicts and machines, they are consistently being stripped of the ability to judge. Ultimately, Gatto rounds his argument up to conclude that school drills children to be employees and consumers and their capacities are limited which should not have been.