Against School John Gatto Analysis

Education is the most important possession one must have as it is the only possession that cannot be taken away from him, and because it will open up the windows of opportunities. Therefore schools are considered as the best place for people to get an education, the best path to follow if one wants to have a valuable life, to achieve his goal. Going to school is considered as a top priority for countless people as they believe that with the education they will acquire will help them to get better jobs, to be prepared to the situations they will face on the outside world. Also, in a certain sense education through schools, colleges is the process by which a society accumulates knowledge, values and skills and transmits this cultural heritage

from generation to generation. Considering this last point some people such as John Gatto and Sugata Mitra produce some insights and end up the idea that the content of the current public system of education is questionable. Indeed while John Gatto argues that that the current school system in USA doesn’t teach really students but makes them bored, Sugata Mitra proposed another way of teaching children. Both of them agree that the system is ineffective and that something need to be done. In front of these two point of views, homeschooling appears as a solution because homeschooled children receive a one on one education and also homeschooled children are better students and better persons.
The best advantage that a homeschooled child can receive is a one on one education that can make children more focus and less bored while learning.

In his essay “Against school” John Gatto states from experience as a school teacher that the current education system is ineffective and make students bored as well as the teachers. Indeed on one hand the students are not motivated by attending to classes because most of them have either already cover the concepts taught or just don’t understand what is being taught. “They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around” (142).Therefore they come to believe that their teachers are not knowledgeable about the topics they teach and don’t understand their real needs. On the other hand, teachers also feeling bored to “reach students who are rude and interested only in grades” (142). Those who try to change the curriculum that are set in order to create a more effective teaching classes found themselves “trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children”(142). The problem of boredom of students at school is addressed by Sugata Mitra in his speech The child –driven education. Indeed through his experiment a hole in the wall, he found that “children will learn what they want to learn to do” (1). For him, if students have interest into something they will not have any problems to learn this thing, therefore they won’t feel bored. In this point, Gatto and Mitra share the same point of view which is if children are motivated to learn they will learn, if they are not they won’t. The issue is to find an appropriate way to identify what children are really interested by and to have time to spend to each individual students. There are many students in a single class and each of them is interested by something different. This problem is solved by the system of homeschooling, because the child receives extra help in the subjects he or she is having trouble in. If a child does not

understand something, the parents can go over and over it until he finally understands it, for the topics in which the child is doing well the parents can make the assignments more challenging by introducing new stuffs for example. This type of teaching takes into account the child’s pace of learning, makes the lessons more fun and makes learning more personal by making children learn about things they are interested by.
Homeschooling system produces better students and persons than the current public system of education as they become independent learners and learn to think by themselves. Gatto about the purpose of schools argues that “our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern” (145). And that its purpose is not to really teach students but “to create a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers” (147).According to him the current system establishes fixed habits for students and does not encourage students to think by themselves which restrain the development of critical thinking and analytical skills. This lack of analytical skills and critical thinking makes people easy to manipulate for electorate purposes for example and for consumer manipulation. “Schools didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop … and that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing” (148). Clearly for Gatto the real purpose of schools is to create a massive working class that is easy to control and to manipulate. As solutions Gatto proposes that teachers should be trained to give children the latitude to figure things on their own. By this way students could be “leaders and aventurers”(145) and will be able to “think critically and independently”(145).While Gatto alights his truth about the purpose of schools, Mitra through his different experiences proposes an alternative method of teaching that could deal with the problem of receiving real education for children.in fact, Mitra found that in absence of formal teachers, children can teach themselves and each other if they are motivated. According to Mitra “A student that can be replaced by a machine should be” (4:20), in other words children don’t need teachers to learn things. Also for Mitra through his way of teaching students can learn many things and rapid improvements can be observed, students can “become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth”(5:45). This last point is questionable because it may be true that students could acquire skills by themselves but are they really aware of how to deal with all these knowledge? Are they really critical thinkers? This part is brought out during Mitra experiments, indeed when he tried to prove that children can taught biotechnology by their own, the students learn many stuffs but didn’t realize it. “Apart from the fact that improper replications of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we’ve understood nothing else” (8:00).This sentence tells that the children didn’t know what to do with so much information. This issue of becoming deep thinkers is not present with homeschooled child because homeschooled children are self-motivated, they have the desire to know about particular subjects. Therefore instead of learning things just to pass tests and forget the information, they learn to have a better understanding. This point is shared by Mitra as he posits “if students have interest, then education happens” (4:28), also contrary to schools where it is limited, homeschooled children can ask as many questions as they want to their parents and getting use to this way of learning which is one of the basis of becoming a critical thinker.

In conclusion, Gatto and Mitra have the same point of view concerning the current education system. They both agree that it is not working well and that something need to be done to fix it. However they clash on the solutions they proposed, while Gatto proposed more creativity and flexibility to give teaching to students, Mitra proposed a system in which teachers are inexistent. These two solutions contain some flaws each other’s, fortunately the system of homeschooling have the advantage to deal with the problems raised by Mitra and Gatto. Indeed homeschooling appears as a balance between these two point of view because first it “help kids take an education rather than a schooling” (143) by taking into account the students pace of learning and adapting to it. Second homeschooling permits to students to develop knowledge on their own as they are trained to be critical thinkers, and to think independently.