What I found nuance about Gatto’s analyzation of the school system is the way the system affects everyone involved. The modern education system does not allow students to physically control what information is being taught to them. Students are now passive bodies that are molded by their environment and have no agency to change their situation. Economic factors and poor test scores barricade individuals from reaching a successful point in society. This is a new form of segregation that aids in perpetuating capitalistic views. I completely agree that today’s population is being fed material that in turn, feeds our materialistic and social desires.

But Gatto fails to emphasize that the United States’ population cannot abandon the public school system because of its value in society and he diminishes the positive aspects of being educated. He failed to mention the very successful people that are bred through the school system and continue to find joy in education. And he is also functioning on the assumption that parents do not teach their children at home. In his conclusion, Gatto encourages parents to ameliorate the harms of schooling by simply parenting their children. This is such a naïve response to an extremely complex issue. Parental intervention will not solve the systematic issues that are deeply rooted in American ideals.

In this piece, Gatto claims that the educational system was created as a tool for social control of the masses. Accordingly, meritocracy is an extension of this means of control, separating the masses by their utility to the social machine. The point of grades and ranking in such a system are to facilitate this process of differentiation, elevating the few the system deems deserving to positions of power while consigning the rest to roles of subservient cogs in the machine.

Considered in this light, institutions such as Williams are no more than an extension of this very system, perpetuating the existing power structure and magnifying the distinctions between the winners in this system and everyone else. Indeed a liberal arts education is a reflection of this elitist view of society. As quoted in the Gatto piece, Woodrow Wilson himself said a liberal arts education was to be confined to a selected few while the rest “forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks” (37).

Williams goes so far as to active flaunt its role in this system, specifically culling  “students of high academic ability and great personal promise” in order to provide a “privilege that creates the opportunity and responsibility to serve society at large” (Williams Mission Statement). That this purposeful segmentation of society to perpetual elite rule seems virtuous both on the part of the institutions as well as those subject to its practices reflects the extent to which this notion of meritocracy has permeated our modern condition.

While Gatto certainly points out some of the troubling aspects of our current schooling system, I do not believe that schools are as intellectually limiting as Gatto suggests. Gatto claims that our educational system is “deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens.” However, Gatto is mistaken in this claim because the public education system allows students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to become educated and get to institutions like Williams.

Although our current education system fosters inequality, Gatto’s proposed alternative would undoubtedly be far worse. Encouraging parents to take their children’s’ education into their own hands rather then send them to school, will only create further inequality and limit certain children’s ability to succeed later in life. Naturally, parents who are relatively secure financially and have jobs that enable them to spend a lot of time with their children will be able to encourage and educate their children, while parents who must work long hours or multiple jobs in order to support their families will, for good reason, be unable to prioritize the intellectual stimulation of their children. This proposal would only move us further away from a true meritocracy, where hard work is the only predictor of success.

I believe that Williams does not reinforce the claims being made in the piece because Williams strives to admit students from extremely diverse backgrounds who have strived to get the most out of the educational system, rather than be suppressed and limited by it.

In Against Schools, Gatto asserts that the United States public-school system has systematically, “encouraged students not to think at all” (Gatto, 37). As the product of twelve years of public schooling, I can partially attest to this. The meritocracy of public schools is structured such that the “smart,” “successful,” “most-likely-to-succeed” students are the ones with the highest GPAs. Unfortunately for society, a high GPA is more a measure of conformity than intellect. Those individuals who strive for high GPAs often must take specific classes, learn material to prepare for test rather than to understand, and learn to memorize instead of thoughtfully analyze. It is no wonder that these “successful” individuals lose the capacity to think for themselves.

However, there are those individuals who preserve the, “curiosity, adventure, resilience, and capacity for surprising insights” (Gatto, 34). They are the individuals who love learning for learning’s sake, who explore what they love outside of the classroom, and who would never sacrifice their intellectual enrichment for the sake of a grade. So, while I agree with Gatto that our schools are not set up in a way to encourage students to think for themselves, such students do exist in the current system.

Gatto also falters when discussing the complicity of our teachers in this meritocracy. Every school will have some teachers who have little interest in their subjects, but what Gatto fails to mention are those teachers – the heroes of our system – who possess a passion for both their subject and their students. Those teachers who inspire a love of learning and help them combat the classroom’s endemic boredom are the reason that, despite some glaring flaws, I have great hope in our educational system’s ability to produce the next generation of thoughtful, curious, and resilient leaders.

Gatto makes it clear that there are problems with the current K-12 school system in the United States. He claims that they foster conformity and obedience, and he suggests that modern schools do not benefit today’s society. I agree that schools tend to breed a certain type of student, but I think it is rash to claim that society’s problems lie in schooling. Instead, I think the problem lies with Americans’ concept of success. We associate wealth with success, and our educational system ges on future jobs, not future growth and happiness. Consequently, the children that cannot succeed in our meritocratic school system are labeled as lazy and deserving of their failure. The nature of a meritocracy in modern American schooling hurts both its students and society as a whole.

Students should be rewarded for working hard. However, our school system is based on the false premise that all students are given the same opportunities. Some schools have lower funding than others, leading to drastically different experiences. But when done well, schooling can change lives for the better. Schools can introduce students to different viewpoints, new subjects, and job opportunities. These are vital to success in the modern, dynamic world. I think that Williams is a great model a of a school that encourages independent thinking and personal development, but it would be difficult for a public K-12 school to copy a college with a $2.5 billion endowment.

In his essay, John Taylor Gatto points out several valid criticisms of the public school system in the United States. Among his many points, he hints at the emphasis placed on standardized testing results. This focus limits the lesson plans teachers are allowed to pursue. As a result, students are generally exposed to material that does not invite opportunities for critical thinking. Because I attended a public school which struggled with funding, I am familiar with many of the issues Gatto mentions. However, I do not believe public schools deserve the blunt of his blame.

Public school curriculum does not develop in a vacuum. It reflects the values of the society that we live in today. Therefore, I do not think that public schools intentionally act to curb critical thinking. For better or worse, many of the jobs in our workforce do not require critical thinking. Instead, they demand discipline and training. To meet these demands, students generally have to obtain a college education. Ironically, most colleges demand a similar discipline in the form of grades and extra curricular activities. When viewed in this context, it seems that public schools are merely trying to prepare students for the world that awaits them after graduation.

While I completely disagree with my public school’s curriculum, I don’t blame the school system itself for its development. Critical thinking isn’t useful in a meritocracy. Our public school system is just a symptom of a larger societal indifference towards thought.

Gatto makes the statement “Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests…and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole (36).”  I think within all levels of education there are specific divisions put in place to let this disunity exist within the population. In grade school there are programs like GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) that begins in 4th grade. Students that meet the criteria are removed from the classroom for a certain amount of time everyday and given a “higher level” schooling in math and english. This type of system exists in middle and high school educations as well, with Honors and AP tracks that segregate the “smart” students from the average students.

Moreover the abundance of intensive sports programs segregate students even further by taking student-athletes out of the campus culture in the afternoons and on weekends in both high school and college level. Systems like this that seek to benefit students and their specific “talents and gifts” create a discordant population of youth that are unable to connect with one another because their schooling is completely different. The lack of relation leads to the society that Gatto describes, because the real world doesn’t function on the “useless” talents pursued in the education system.

In Gatto’s “Against School,” he notes, “compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclass,” (36). In my second-hand experience, the public school system certainly does this, by operating on local funding, and allowing subtle inequalities to arise depending on a region’s income level, thus determining a school’s quality. I would add to Gatto’s argument that while disunifying the bottom of the ladder, the nation’s school system indeed brings the upper echelon together in higher education. While independent efforts are fighting to change this aspect of the college admission process, accessibility depends on a student’s means, thereby resulting in the amalgamation of individuals of a certain financial status. Again, many institutions (including Williams) attempt to fight this current within the system, but can only do so to a point. Our college maintains its elitism by offering preferential admission to students of legacy status and athletes, the latter often reflecting increased availability to necessary resources. While this previous claim may be controversial, the fact that Williams prides itself on selecting top students is not, and oftentimes tutors, some form of test-prep, or simply secondary school with great resources hide behind those outstanding GPAs and test scores. With its sizable barriers to entry, I believe that Williams certainly plays a role in maintaining power in the elite, producing–albeit liberally educated–citizens to sustain and pass on the authority to the next generation (via alumni connections perhaps). Moreover, in maintaining a large endowment, the College acknowledges the role such wealth can have in boosting its prestige, thereby reflecting an awareness of rankings at the institutional—rather than the individual as in Gatto’s discussion—level. While simultaneously perpetuating the problem, the College remains stuck within the system as well, and thus can solely redefine the education system within such confines.