Summary Of Against School By Laurence Steinberg

Both Laurence Steinberg’s “What’s Holding Back American Teenagers” and John Taylor Gatto in “Against School” present focused critiques on the broken American System. Although, both authors share a primary argument: the American school system is broken because students are not being challenged throughout their years in High School, they used different structures, and they supported their claim with different subarguments, in order to convince the students and parents, which are the main audience. However, the effect that the author's subargument is going to have in their reader is unknown. The fact that Steinberg used statistics to support his argument: that American schools are easy, make his argument even more stronger and more persuasive,

Gatto’s strategy is better than Steinberg’ s strategy because statistics can cause boredom to the reader. Also, because, the author now is giving different perspective of how people see the American school system, as he make reference to the modern schools as the “... the results of a “revolution”...”(Gatto 4). Gatto used shocking quotes from American satirist H.L Mencken; who wrote that education “... is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.., is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality (Gatto 3). In other words, Gatto’s purpose with this quote is to make the reader see that the government intentionally misdiagnosed the problem: that American school system is broken because schools are getting easier with the pass of the time. This type of strategy used by Gatto to support his argument give him extra chance to convince the reader of his argument because he is presenting two side of the school system: “what we had back then and this is what we have

Meanwhile, both authors try to gain the trust of the students and parents with their subargument that schools are easier in America and that the government misdiagnosed this problem; they present different techniques that will allow them to transmit their message to the audience in an easy way and a better way to be understood. For an author is important to choose very carefully their strategies, their strategies depend whether they persuade the reader or not. In other words, the use of strategies such as the use of statistics, personal experience or important character points of views is important in a author’s argument because it help the author to deliver the message more clear to the reader. For instance, even though Steinberg used statistics to support his claim, Gatto’s strategy of using personal experience of important characters as Conant and Mencken gave him more credibility and more chance for his argument to be understood. Personal experience is a better way to catch the attention of the reader than statistics, since most of the reader are always looking for the emotional part and also because statistic for some readers it can be harder to understand or because they are not reliable since they always change . That’s something that statics and personal experience bring to the mind of