While many of the problems Gatto identifies with modern education are real, especially its roots in separating out a favored and homogenized class of elites from a disposable working class, I find his overall arguments to be a little too nonspecific, and his narrative of education as creating an obedient hivemind enslaved by consumer culture and suppressing the genius of the would-be exalted among us too easily appropriated by conspiratorial thinkers who define themselves as rebels against an undefined System, and thus prone to missing the point entirely. Similarly, some of his argumentative techniques fall flat; to praise home-school when it is so often a tool used by the privileged and the revanchist to deprive children of the fundamental knowledge that public education tends to provide accurately is hardly productive, and to suggest that Great Men of history had no public education and were so much Greater than what modern education produces plays into the exact same uncritical conception of history that Gatto would probably like to think he despises. Ultimately, so many of the evils of modern education have nothing to do with the fact that it is mandated but that it is withheld and made unequal, as school segregation that persists to this day can attest.  No critique of our culture of standardized testing, for instance, can be complete without acknowledging that the SAT was designed not to homogenize thought but to keep Jewish students out of Harvard, and serve as part of a broader project of racism and anti-semitism by linking high test scores to cultural backgrounds already constant among elite white men. Like so many other issues, hyper-focusing on a vaguely defined factor while not talking about race is an easy way to construct slipshod analysis.