John Taylor Gatto Against School

Schools are like prisons. A student wakes up, goes to school, sits for an hour for each class, for seven classes, five days a week, nine months a year, for 12 years...if they do not decide to go to college. This monotonous routine has been shoved down the throats of students for years ever since attending school was made a requirement by the government and it doesn’t help today’s world at all. In her essay The Essentials of a Good Education, Diane Ravitch writes about the faults in our education system and how we need to refine our education system so that everyone benefits. In John Taylor Gatto’s essay, Against School, Gatto explores the realms of schools and how they are an outdated system that hurts individuals and encourage for people to

Creativity is the source of all things, and it helps students express themselves. So, why are schools limiting students by giving them standardized tests that don’t prove their worth and cutting educational programs such as music and art? As Ravitch calls attention to this necessity in his essay, “Every school should have the resources to enable students to express their individuality or to take pleasure in joyful activities”(112). The resources Ravitch is talking about are advanced classes, moderate class sizes, art programs, and physical education to list a few. However, when schools only receive funding from standardized tests schools are forced to put all of their already limited money into math and english. This limits creativity because school is where children develop and they use things such as music and sports in order to explore their curiosities. And creativity is what makes inventors, innovators, leaders, and most of all ideas. Creativity only benefits society, and when schools limit students from that creativity they are limiting society. As mentioned before, schools are a place where children learn about themselves, however as Gatto calls attention the integration function. Gatto explains that the “Integration function is trying to make students as similar to one another as much as possible in order for governments to have the ability to predict what people what people will do in order to control them”(page #). Clearly, one of the main reasons governments even established schools was to make people conform in order to control them. And not only does this lead to a grim and boring society, it doesn’t allow anyone to think for themselves in order to stop chaos or point out flaws in the legal