John Taylor Gatto a teacher for over thirty years wrote the article, Against School, which appeared in Harper’s magazine in 2003. He questions public education and whether or not it is what our children should be going through in order to become educated and ready for the real world. He has first hand seen education and its faults for over thirty years, taught in many schools and has found reason to think of schools- with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness (149). He explains that in this country we have been taught (schooled) to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling, ” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense (150). This article mainly written for Americans, teachers, parents, and students is meant to open eyes and begin questioning our school system as a whole if we haven’t already began to wonder what our children are learning and what they are doing while at school all day. From Ellwood Cubberleys’ 1922 edition of Public School Administration Cubberley writes:
“ Our schools are…factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned… And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down (154). Gatto explains that maturity has been stripped from every aspect of our lives, easy answers have removed the need to ask questions.
According to Gatto there are six unstated purposes or functions of public schooling, (1)the adjustive or adaptive function explains how schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority, precluding critical judgment completely. (2) The integrating function or “conformity function” is to make children alike as much as possible. (3) Diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role by documenting evidence on cumulative records. (4) The differentiating function explains that once the student’s social role has been determined, children are to be sorted by role and only receive training as far as their destination in the social machine merits, and no further. (5) The selective function refers to Darwin’s theory as what he called “favored races”. The idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock, schools are meant to tag the unfit- with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments- enough so that peers will accept them as inferior and bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. (6) The propaedeutic function says a small fraction of kids will be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged.
From my own experience as having been a student at a public school and also a charter school in high school I think I have a bit more knowledge and experience having been apart of two completely different schools. At Aptos High I felt like these six unstated purposes of public schooling were what the school was trying to impose of the students and it was so hard to branch out actually challenge ones self or any of the things we were being “taught”. With such large classes and over-crowding and students unable to sit in class there were groups of students always uninformed and usually off doing their own thing while the class was split apart, the working students and the goofing off students. When at the end of the day both groups graduated with the same diploma when all was said and done. When I had had enough I decided that Cypress Charter School would be a better fit for me. The school was a very small campus behind an elementary school consisting of four portable buildings and an office. The classes were much smaller and consisted of students of all age. There were no “freshman” or “seniors” we were all unified and worked together to help one another enjoy school and better each other’s education by offering help and getting help whenever help was needed. If it wasn’t for my change in schooling I don’t think I would have the same view I have today nor would I think education is such a big deal even now in college because of my horrible expericence with such a large public school and all the faults and difficulties I saw and experienced every day.
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