This article reminded me of a TIME article I saw a couple months ago called “Wondering What Happened to Your Class Valedictorian? Not Much, Research Shows.” This article, while different than Gatto’s makes one similar point: those who do well in school are not usually the ones who end up being super successful, especially if success is measured in the amount of money that a person makes. School teaches students to think within a box with the motivation of a good grade. Creativity is not usually rewarded and while diversity of thought is encouraged, it is not at all mandatory or pushed as important. In this way, those that do well in school are often those who know how to work within a box, game a system, and get a good grade. In the real world, these skills are not necessary. Creativity is necessary because employers do not want people who could do exactly what the person sitting next to them can. Instead, employers want people who will push new ideas that could help their company advance in a forward-moving, competitive society. Even if a person is not working for a company, creativity and the ability to think differently and diversely thought is key. Steve Jobs, for example, dropped out of college after six months, yet went on to become one of the modern technological geniuses.

Overall, I believe that there are certain ways to make school productive and there are reasons why a school environment is beneficial, however classes need to be structured in a productive way and perhaps, to start, not around how to earn the highest grade.

When reading this article, I was reminded how much I enjoyed the critical and perplexing questions of education and merit, much of which I addressed in my Meritocracy class last spring. Though I agree with certain parts of what Gatto discusses in his article, especially his mentioning Inglis’s “selective function” (37) of schooling, I feel that Gatto has mislabeled and underemphasized the largest outcome of the American education system: the perpetuation of socioeconomic status and the elimination of social mobility. Gatto highlights school as a vehicle which primarily “trains children to obey reflexively” (38). Though schooling does enforce obedience, especially through grading systems, it even more so keeps separated those with high economic capital from those who do not by creating an uneven starting point. Groups with little economic, social, or cultural capital must work much harder to reach the status of which those with a lot of capital began. The grading and process of schooling combine together to identify students with the most perceived “merit.” However, “merit” is socially constructed and defined by those who maintain power, which in turn creates a very real and concerning power dynamic. People who are recognized to not have merit are also made to believe that their lack of it is justified; they may say to themselves that school is not their thing and that it would be in their best interest to redirect their time and energy to something new. Society is then participating in aspects of what Gaventa calls “the Third Dimension” of power politics which is characterized as the “focus upon the means by which social legitimations are developed around the dominate, and instilled as beliefs or roles in the dominated” (Gaventa, 15). Social mobility is eradicated and power is legitimized and perpetuated.

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.

It is difficult to relate to Taylor Gatto’s analysis having a Williams education, as we are pushed to take on the “grown-up” (38) material he mentions. The  spiritual abyss that arises when thinking about the role of grades and rank in our society is overwhelming. However, if a public school education as the author describes it, allows us at a minimum, a “mediocre intellect”, or as I see it– at least a mediocre life, then I suppose we should take this as a reliable safety net. In the United States, if one doesn’t have at least K-12 schooling, they are perceived to be of little value to our society. And while I would love to see everyone in the world have an education as intellectually engaging as the one we have, I think there are more dire matters at hand. What really caught my attention is Taylor Gatto’s claim that “schools are meant to tag the unfit…to wash the dirt down the drain” (37). What of the children who are deemed unfit for school– of those who can’t even make it into the ranking we so dread? There are a variety of reasons for this: there are some geniuses in the mix, but it’s mostly an issue of  /background/social status/cognitive abilities. When the playing field is uneven we begin to understand the failure of meritocracy. Your success is ultimately about your opportunities. So when the author writes about issues like  conformity, I am frustrated alongside him. However, it seems that this piece lacks a large piece of the puzzle.

The American system of public education ensures stability in society. Having our country’s children enrolled in the K-12 system avoids leaving too much to chance. Children are not given the intellectual freedom that will allow them to view the world through their own critical lens. They are taught what, not how, to think. Thus, the public education system creates a culture of conformity that ensures powerful intellectual factions will not emerge. The Prussia-inspired utopian state that the framers of our education system strived for would surely not fair well with an onslaught of intellectual diversity in the public eye, especially stemming from our nation’s energized youth. The utopian idea of perfection is not intellectually multifaceted.
However, I had a much different experience attending independent schools and thus far at Williams College. In high school I had round table discussions and engaged with my classmates in creative assignments. My teachers emphasized the importance of understanding concepts rather than simply memorizing facts. They allowed me to draw my own conclusions from the material provided and strengthened my critical thinking on a variety of subjects. I now know that if children are not taught in this way, they will never be able to truly think for themselves nor escape the metaphorical confines of the classroom. While they should (more or less) have no trouble securing a fairly stable job with the proper education and training, they will miss out on some of the most meaningful aspects of life, questioning and interpreting ourselves and the society we live in, often through the mediums of music, philosophy and literature. Overall, I am optimistic that with the proper type of schooling, our nation’s children can emerge to live the fullest and most gratifying life possible.

I have always understood the practice of assigning grades and scores as a form of incentive: a way to ensure that we take our learning seriously. In many ways, this is true. Without a lack of incentive, I am certain many young kids would give their learning far too little priority. Yet scoring systems are much more than just an incentive. They force students to conform to the belief that we compete against our peers in most of what we do. Furthermore, it promotes the idea of School as a means by which to earn grades, rather than a way to enrich one’s knowledge. I think this is especially true at Williams, a place where nearly every student had an amazing GPA in high school and/or excellent standardized test scores. Williams students are no doubt hungry for knowledge and interested in exploring the curriculum offered here; however, the concept of grades is nonetheless engrained in the way we approach school. It almost always seems the case that, when course registration rolls around, the courses with “easy grading” or a “light work load” are ranked above those with “engaging material” or which are “challenging but rewarding”. While I believe that Williams students are nowhere near being the monotonous and robotic products of the school system that Gatto describes in his paper, I certainly agree that the idea of ranking and distinction is something that we have all come to accept as normal and important in our Williams experience.