John Gatto asked the following question about school aged children, "Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure that not one of them ever really grows up?" I believe he means that in the current state of education, kids cannot grow into "themselves" to become well adjusted adults with a variety of useful attributes to offer the world. They are raised to be drones to serve the needs of society. The following are four examples from the text that assert this way of thinking...
Gatto shared a lesson about what his grandfather taught him about boredom. "...if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap."
Schools want conformity. Inglis breaks down schooling in six basic functions, including, "The integrating function. This might as well be called the 'conformity function,' because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force."
"Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults." We as adults lack self control because of what we were taught in our youth. We expect everything to be easy. When it life is not easy, we feel as if it is unfair.
"School trains children to obey reflexively;...Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned." This turns people to be servants to the world.
There were other examples in the text showing how the educational system causes students to become child-like adults. It is appalling to think that we still follow a system that is known to fail when it comes to helping people become actual successful adults in the workplace. When will the changes Gatto illustrates, and others of similar value, occur in the realm of educating your youth?
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