John Taylor Gatto Against School Summary

In his article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto writes regarding his opinions that America’s current system of schooling children is bad within itself, and unfixable. In this essay Gatto includes confusing personal antecedents, historical examples that do not correspond with modern day society smoothly, and overall he just does not fully explain his already weak evidence. Due to this, instead of convincing parents to take their children out of school and rethink society, he just leaves the reader confused over what the problems truly are.

Gatto starts his paper off by addressing the problem of boredom in public schools, something who has ever attended a public school can attest to. Because the majority of his audience already agrees with

this statement Gatto can then make a claim about why he thinks students and teachers are so bored. Gatto states that we are all to blame, and supports this with a personal story from his experience with his grandfather. While it can be difficult to use personal narrative to support an argument, here it works efficiently, having the audience view it as a wise old man giving life advice, making them more likely to buy into the idea that we are responsible for our own boredom. However, then Gatto seems to leave this argument of being bored behind, not referring it for the rest of his essay. It functions as a good hook, but children and teachers being bored alone is not a sufficient argument for ending our school system without further explanation.
Gatto’s next personal story he tries to use as evidence is about a school he worked at wrongfully terminating him, remarking how hard it was on his personal life, but how it gave him time to reflect on his experience. Unlike the grandfather antecedent, this one just leaves the reader thinking ‘what?’. It appears that Gatto wanted to use this information as another reason to argue why America’s schools are bad, but this example is so unique and not the everyday person's school experience, so the only effect it does have is to make the audience wonder ‘does this writer just have a personal vendetta against schools?”
Even though his essay is titled “Against School”, Gatto also devotes a lot of it to an ‘against childhood’ stance, which does not entirely make sense. The first thing he does is draw a connection between the two ideas by stating that “By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools ... as virtual factories of childishness” (Gatto 684). In the paragraphs preceding this Gatto calls the adults who terminated him ‘childish’, yet fails to share his definition of this term, and more importantly just claims schools were making people childish, assuming causation from an association he has with a few people.
If his demeaning comments about childishness weren’t enough to clearly express Gatto’s views on childhood, he then uses many historical examples, and gives his audience advice for raising their own children, “Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age... there's no telling what your own kids could do” (Gatto 690). Upon first glance this may seem inspiring, but really it is deceiving and incorrect. Edison did attend public school for a while, and then because he had an attention disorder and his teacher was not equipped to handle him his mother, a public school teacher, home schooled him. Franklin didn’t just turn twelve and start studying by himself with no experience, he had been in school for years before. These historical figures only half support his argument because yes they did study independently, but they also received school curriculum that allowed them to reach where they did. This argument also is inefficient because the phrasing of the comment clearly indicates that the reader is a parent, but I don’t believe any modern day parent would want their twelve year old anywhere near a war ship.
Gatto’s other historical example of Ariel Durant does showcase how a child not acting as in they are in their ‘childhood’ can succeed, but his description also prominently includes the description, “was happily married at fifteen” (Gatto 685).

In modern day American society it is a widely accepted belief that fifteen year olds should not be getting married because they are children and even though this happened in the past does not mean it should continue happening now. We have looked at the research and accepted that childhood is a distinct developmental stage, so looking at glorified historical figure’s childhoods is just not an effective method for Gatto to get his point

across.
While his historical references may be questionable in some regards, they are not the biggest flaw in Gatto’s logic. The biggest flaw is that he has none. Throughout his entire piece Gatto makes large claims with very strong word choices, and says that school is the problem, but he never elaborates to add in the linkages of how. There are a few instances such as when he references standardized testing and overcrowding schools so that they look like warehouses; two very legitimate problems with our school system. However, these are the exceptions, and for someone who was a school teacher for thirty years one would think he would talk about being inside the classroom.
One of many places we can see this lack of explanation is at the end of the essay where his tone and style shift to an angry rant and he mentions “divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships” “We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer” “We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not” (Gatto 689).

He writes an entire anti-consumerism rant pointing out what he thinks to be flaws in our society, and then ends it with “our schooling, as intended, has seen to it” (Gatto 689). This structure is not an argument, it is a group of complaints and then an assertion of the blame onto the schools. Gatto doesn’t elaborate, give any type of personal or statistical evidence, or even explain his reasoning of how he thinks the way schools are related to this. In some places he states what he thinks schools are doing to children, that they are “encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear” (Gatto 689) However, he has no evidence of how schools are doing this, and this is not some universal statement such as that school can be boring, it’s an incredibly specific uncommon belief and in order to persuade anyone Gatto has to provide more evidence and

explanation.
While some of what he says makes logical sense, Gatto overall is not entitled to the broad claims he makes against childhood and against school. With some irrelevant personal antecedents, outdated historical examples that do not transfer into our modern day society, and with a lack of elaboration or explanation, his essay just leaves the reader confused and with questions. Even with the claims that were logical they did not fully back his argument as one could ask ‘why don’t we just make reforms, why get rid of it all’, and most importantly he never discusses an alternative, making it the reader’s job to wonder what a world without school would look like instead of being told.