In George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” he elaborates on the complicated and often blurred power dynamics between Imperial Britain and present-day Myanmar (Burma at the time), describing how he is unlucky enough to be in the worst position of all: a white police officer in Moulmein, a Burmese town. While Orwell due to his ethnicity and official position possesses an objective power over the Burmese at the surface, it is clear as he tells his story of shooting the elephant that this is not the case.

To me it is clear that after Orwell goes against his will and shoots the elephant to “avoid looking (like) a fool,” he officially acknowledges that despite his official government position, he has less power than both the British, who he hates, and the Burmese people over whom he rules. In his decision to shoot the elephant he succumbs to British law as he says that “legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog,” and the will of the Burmese people simultaneously, as he fights an internal battle in deciding whether to act on what he personally believes or what will grant the most approval from the Burmese crowd that is watching him. All in all, Orwell is stuck between a rock and a hard place as he is constantly burdened with serving Imperial Britain and striving for the approval of the Burmese, both of whom he has mutual disdain for. As a result, the official power that is granted to Orwell by Britain proves to be inferior to the unofficial power that the Burmese hold over him in seeking their approval when shooting the elephant, showing that true power does not always lie visible to the naked eye.

In “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell argues that the colonized hold an exceptional amount of power over their colonizers. To prove this point, he describes his experience as a British police officer in Burma. One day, he is called in to take care of an elephant that went on a rampage in town. When Orwell finds the elephant, it has returned to a tranquil state. While he has no interest in killing the elephant, a crowd from the village has followed him and they expect the elephant to be killed. Due to this, Orwell ultimately kills the elephant. He ends the story with, “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

While Orwell believes the natives drove his eventual decision, I think his story speaks to the power of British imperialism over its own officials. Orwell continuously bashes the British Empire throughout his story. He mentions, “…I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.” However, even with this belief, Orwell loyally obeys the Empire when he kills the elephant. While he may have been concerned about his own personal pride, it seems just as likely that he was unconsciously concerned with the image of the Empire. Imperialistic powers can never appear weak. That often means officials have to perform actions they disagree with. Perhaps the strongest forms of power are only evident below the surface.

In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell argues that he was forced by the performative roles of dominator and dominated within the British colonial system to kill the elephant that was formerly mad. He nearly quotes Havel and others with his references to the mask that began fitting his face and the fact that he was really a puppet, not a lead actor, that was being pushed by all of the Burmese’s desires. He even takes this notion far enough to generalize it across all colonialism when he says, “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

I would like to challenge this idea. I do agree with Orwell that some performative, second/third dimension aspects of power were, knowingly or otherwise, being used on him by the Burmese. However, Orwell thoroughly dominates every Burmese person in this crowd with physical, literal power, both individually (white, having a gun) and by being British. But here is the counterfactual – had he demanded that people in the town watch the elephant until the mahout’s return, would they not have done as he said because of colonialism’s power dynamics? Or, slightly differently, I disagree that doing the above would have been some display of weakness. If it were, I believe it would have been so minor as to be corrected with an equally small display of British strength.

In Against School, a main tenet of Gatto’s argument is that the current public schooling system in the United states and elsewhere is stunting the growth of students in mass numbers and delaying their exit from or keeping them perpetually in childhood. I disagree with him on this point. The qualities that Gatto associates with the stunted growth he speaks of, that of strict obedience, the consumption of unneeded products to fill emotional crevices created by a lack of real human connections, and the compartmentalization of people into different levels of class, intelligence, and worth, among others, are really that of adults who have had their childlike qualities of curiosity, empathy, industry and need for connection stripped from them due to having to work in a system that does not reward such characteristics.

As for Gatto’s claims on the use of public schooling to create a mass of similarly educated people making them easier to rule over. I would agree that there is truth to this and argue that it is integral in keeping our current American way of government and our economy functioning at the “Neo-Liberal” status quo. If every citizen had read heaps of political philosophy there would be too much contention over how we should govern our country, and no one who would want to work in a factory job.

As for a solution to Gatto’s problem of the stunting of children’s mental growth, if he really wants the mass creation of educated intellectual powerhouses, homeschooling would be a laughable fix. The parents of the poster child who will stay a perpetual adolescent due to public schooling are likely to have been put into the same box as the child by the school system years before, making them inadequate to confer what the child needs onto him. If one really wishes to create a mass of educated men and women that believe in their ability to obtain pawer and enact change let them read works like Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and have a teacher weather adequate in their position or not, work through how the innate nature of humans brought us to our current world order, and then let them choose for themselves a path of resistance or Ressentiment.

I think Gatto is right to question the generally (and naively) accepted mission of public education. This mission, as Gatto writes on page 35 of his essay, is to help children grow into good people and citizens. I, however, disagree with Gatto’s radical and perhaps excessively cynical view that the government saw mandatory education as an opportunity to produce a “docile” population of “mediocre intellect” (36). Additionally, I reject the proposition that education is intended to keep the young population childish for as long as possible. Granted, Edison and Farragut (neither of whom was educated like we are today) were more accomplished by the time they reached high school age than most people nowadays are as adults – but it’s also true that they were far more accomplished than their peers. These people were exceptional, just like there are exceptional children – and adults – now. I would still say, though, that today’s population is, on average, more intelligent, knowledgeable, and/or accomplished than Edison’s.

I won’t deny that public education creates a more easily governed population. In fact, I think it’s definitely easier to manage a population that has gone through a uniform system of schooling. This part of Gatto’s assessment is fair, and I’d think it likely that this was an incentive for the introduction of a public education system. But I just don’t buy that this and the government-supported dumbing down of young society is the primary purpose of public schooling.

One reason I find Gatto’s proposition so difficult to accept is that I actually think the American system of education is pretty liberal and affords students and teachers a decent amount of freedom. I grew up familiar with the Lebanese Baccalaureate system, which seems more likely to be designed with the goals Gatto refers to in mind than the US system. Kids take a standardized set of classes, with no flexibility within the curriculum, so everyone memorizes the same classical Arabic poetry and learns about the same rivers and mountains. The era-defining civil war of 1975 is not even taught in school because of how it makes the government look. It is perhaps because I’ve been exposed to this kind of educational system – and because I see the American education system as appealing – that I can’t agree with Gatto’s thoughts on the American system.

A final thought on the solution proposed by Gatto, which is basically for parents to teach their kids differently from the public education system. I think the solution is idealistic and likely to do more harm than good. It can’t be taken seriously as a potential solution to the problem he describes.