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Against School

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Submitted By pawpaow
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In the article Against School, written by John Taylor Gatto, compares school to the concept of boredom. He also explores the question if school is really as necessary as we make it. Also, explains the situation with the fact that most famous people didn’t go to school and they still managed became very successful people in life. Gatto expresses how students and teachers are both bored because, students are being taught information that they already know, while teachers are bored because they feel that the students have bad attitudes and do not want to learn but just want good grades. Boredom is the common condition to everyone who spends time in school.
Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn children into servants. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom because school trains children to obey reflexively. Also, people are conditioned to dread being alone, and seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandon. 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.
Gatto’s breaks down the purposes in placing Inglis’ “six basic funtions” of school by trying to overemphasize the reason for public education. Of course, in a sense, these functions have some validity to them, but Gatto makes it seem that students can’t decide for themselves if they will excel in their education. In actuality, it is the students’ choice to determine whether or not they will exceed in their schooling.

According to Gatto informs the readers that students would be interested in learning if they were given an “education” and not “schooling”. Significant number of successful Americans who did not go through the schooling

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