I agree that Gatto supplies a lack of solutions to the problems he presents and, as Syd pointed out, fails to address the larger issues behind the public school system in our country. However, I think that another mistake that Gatto made was failing to realize that the problems he described — of “modern, industrial, compulsory schooling” (page 36) — can be applied to all schools in America, whether private or public, or something else. This is because the larger issue here is that school in general does not encourage creativity due to the focus that many schools place on earning the highest grade. Often in school, students find themselves actually trying to repress their creativity in order to achieve the highest mark. Multiple choice tests provide the perfect example; often two of the answers are quite similar and students find themselves trying to put themselves in the mindset of their teacher because that is what the answer will be, since they are, after all, the ones who chose the answer. This in itself is a problem. While sometimes there is only one correct answer, say for a math problem or science law, often there can be multiple ways of thinking about a situation and the fact that modern schooling often discourages thinking outside of the box is a point that I believe Gatto is correct about.

While one way to start creating a better public school system is definitely to help underfunded public schools and to provide public schools with more resources overall, the problem of discouragement of creativity in schools in general would still be present.