Well, Cerridwen, thank you for the link. I did read through the website as well as doing a little more research on Gatto's ideas. Thank you for valuing my opinion and that is all I can offer here - my opinion!
I believe there is certainly some truth and wisdom in what he has to say. There is little doubt that powerful corporate interests have long managed to exert a degree of control over our schools and have conveniently used mandatory schooling as a means to control the masses...as Gatto describes, as "drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands." And with the now maniacal overuse and misuse of standardized tests, we see these forces on steroids, working as demoralizing human sorting devices, relegating many to assume their subordinate roles in our society, having largely been denied the opportunity to learn to question, probe, think critically and independently.
However, I also find Gatto to be arrogant and self-important and not entirely fair or balanced in his portrayal of our public schools. Goodness knows our public schools and those who labor in them despite incredible challenges manage to do an awful lot of good IN SPITE OF the incessant meddling and colossal screw-ups and unproductive mandates imposed by our corporate/politicos and standardistos. For many of our children suffering abuse, neglect, and all manner of societal ills, public schools are a sort of haven or sanctuary, the only stability in their lives. This school year I have four little students who have been particularly brutalized... their stories are horrendous. The impact on their development - cognitively, socially and behaviorally is huge. And when Friday comes, these needy kids are not excited about it like most kids...indeed they often have expressed to me that they are NOT glad the weekend has come.
In my view, the evil is not our government or our public schools - it is their hijacking by these selfish elites to serve their own interests and keep everybody else down. But I believe it would be disastrous for us to abandon public schools. I very much agree with what Alfie Kohn had to say in a 2004 article that you can access here:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/testtoday.htmI highly recommend reading Kohn's entire article but here are the key excerpts regarding Gatto:
...the handful of progressive-minded individuals who have made common cause with those on the right by attacking public education. John Taylor Gatto is an example here. In a recent Harper’s magazine essay entitled “Against School,” he asserts that the goal of “mandatory public education in this country” is “a population deliberately dumbed down,” with children turned “into servants.”(6)
In support of this sweeping charge, Gatto names some important men who managed to become well-educated without setting foot in a classroom. (However, he fails to name any defenders of public education who have ever claimed that it’s impossible for people to learn outside of school or to prosper without a degree.) He also cites a few “school as factory” comments from long-dead policymakers, and observes that many of our educational practices originated in Prussia. Here he’s right. Our school system is indeed rooted in efforts to control. But the same indictment could be leveled, with equal justification, at other institutions. The history of newspapers, for example, and the intent of many powerful people associated with them, has much to do with manufacturing consent, marginalizing dissent, and distracting readers. But is that an argument for no newspapers or better newspapers?
Ideally, public schools can enrich lives, nourish curiosity, introduce students to new ways of formulating questions and finding answers. Their existence also has the power to strengthen a democratic society, in part by extending those benefits to vast numbers of people who didn’t fare nearly as well before the great experiment of free public education began.
Granted, “ideally” is a hell of a qualifier. But an attack on schooling as we know it is generally grounded in politics rather than pedagogy, and is most energetically advanced by those who despise not just public schools but all public institutions. The marketplace, which would likely inherit the task of educating our children if Gatto got his way, is (to put it gently) unlikely to honor the ideals that inform his critique. Some folks will benefit from that kind of “reform,” but they certainly won’t be kids.(7)
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