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 agree with much of this post.
As I wrote about in my own blog post, it would definitely be more troublesome to govern a highly educated population than a less educated one. I’d also largely agree with the opening paragraph of this post, though I would say that the education system partly contributes to the stripping of childlike qualities (so it isn’t just because they work in environments that don’t value those specific qualities).