HW 50- Notes on Finishing Our School Unit.

The only text that truly interests me is the text written by John Taylor Gatto on "How

public education cripples our kids, and why". Even before i read this text as i read the title I

was immediately interested to hear what this author had to say about how the public cripples

our students in todays education system and his reasoning behind it. So as I started to read

the the text what i noticed was his first argument, an example of this is: "Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?" -Gatto.

I thought that this part of the text really had some kick to it because in my opinion you would never ever hear or see an any adult or author talk about the how teachers are obviously bored while teaching students. As well I'm surprised that Gatto connects these teachers to the same level of boredom that our students of today are experiencing now a days in our so called "compulsory" schooling system. I'll tell Gatto that the whole reason about why we are trapped in this flawed system of schooling that causes mass boredom amongst teachers and students. The reason is us, and i agree with Gatto when he says this in the second paragraph of his text because its my reason one the topic as well. If we make use of our teachers and I'm not saying we don't but what I mean is to actually sit them down and talk to them about the curriculum that they should teach us. What is taught in school should consist of what is interesting to the students on and individual level, this so called "working process" of schooling doesn't give any chance for our students today to actually be interested in school. What it does is make our students exactly feel a way that nobody should ever feel when they are in the process of educating them selves and being educated by others, and the same should go for the teachers in todays schools. Until we can find a way to accomplish this we will continue to lack the true learning abilities of education and we will forever be attempting to learn in a failing system.

Another part of Gatto's text that intrigued me was when he talked about the actually needing an education in the first place. To be specific what made me think this was the text here: "Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated." -Gatto. Now first off what really got me was when he said that there's 2 million happy home schooled students which i think he's talking about are in the US. This surprised me very much because I didn't know that so many students chose to be home schooled instead going to public or private school. As well another thing that caught my attention is a fact that i didn't realize, that our fore fathers like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln didn't go to school at all. I really could not believe that I didn't realize this and use it in a conversation as an argument, but now that I actually have been informed about this controversial information I plan to use this as evidence in future arguments and maybe in future papers. I mean just look at them they became the founders of our Nation the United States of America and then just look how we turn out 234 years later to be teaching our our students in a failing education system obviously they had it down packed back then in the years right before and after 1776. Also another thing that kinda made me feel a little inadequate was when Gatto talked about Ariel Durant whom co-wrote "The Story of Civilization" and was in a happy marriage at the age of 15. This make me feel unequivocally out classes by this young woman at such a young age being so morally and mentally secure. It just shocks me that when she was this young and she was at such a level of prestige that early in life i feel like I'm doing something wrong in my life currently.

This leads me into another example which i would like to share my feeling about. Later in Gatto's text he write about the how the structure of our schooling system today came to be and I always pondered on this fact especially when Andy gave on of his many interesting classes and he taught us that our schooling system started to come into affect during the nineteenth century. As well he said that we adopted it from the education system of the east side of germany during its occupation by the former United Soviet Social Republic when it was being used as soviet satellite state but he didn't really elaborate enough on the specific details as much as I wanted him to. But besides the fact the part of the text where these thought came into my head was: "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best." -Gatto I was also as you should think not too surprised but interested in what Gatto had to say here because I thought that we adopted our type of schooling during the years after World War Two,(1945 and so on) but now I understand that we adopted in between the years of 1905 and 1915 and were constantly elaborating on the process and attempting to make it work better. But i understand now and I'm sure that many other people feel the same way as me that it was a change for the worst because our system is failing and not giving our students what they really need to succeed and better themselves through their own personal interest. And as soon as our society can comprehend the fact that this should be our top priority, our schooling system will continue to breed uninterested, compassionless students with on drive or want to actually learn what they truly want to learn.