The Importance Of Education In Public Schools

In the United States, the average student wakes up around 6-8 a.m. in order to attend school to meet the country’s requirements in education. Because students are waking up early everyday, they are extremely unmotivated to achieve their country’s expectations. Students are expected to excel in math, science, English, and social studies, and they expect them to use their knowledge in these four categories to help make the country the best educated country. In my opinion, this puts a lot of pressure on the students, and discourages them to actually learn the material they are taught. Rather than absorbing the material, the students are memorizing it in order to pass the next exam, and once they pass the exam with an A, they completely forget about the material. Because the students are disinterested, this makes the teachers jobs extremely boring. In the piece, “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, Gatto utilizes ethos and logos to convince the public that the school system is flawed, and students deserve a better education that what they are receiving due to the fact that students are constantly bored in their ‘laboratories of experimentation’.

In chapter 5, Reforming America’s Schools, I learned many things that affect me as an educator. An important fact that interests me was that there are four goals that schools should follow. The first one is academic, including a broad array of knowledge and intellectual skills. The second one is vocational, aimed at readiness for the world of work and economic responsibilities. The third one is social and civic, including skills and behavior for participating in a complex democratic society. The fourth one is personal, including the development of individual talent and self-expression. This will affect me as an educator so that I can follow and do my best to complete these goals. Now I am aware of what should be done in a classroom.

Class after class, day after day, I often sense a massive amount of repetition with school. Each lesson feels more like a chore than an actual learning experience. That’s the way school has always been though, like a job. It is hard to note that there is any sort of progress being made in terms of the everyday learning experience. In his essay, Against School, educator John Taylor Gatto claims that the everyday boredom of school is truly meant to demoralize and dumb down students, destroying individuality and the ability to create independent and critical thinkers. Gatto explains how children are not really growing up, they are only getting older, indicating that public schools exist only to “cripple our kids.” By using his experience in the classroom, Gatto creates an element of pathos and develops a structure which almost fools readers into inferencing what his opinion truly is. Gatto ultimately, through these rhetorical devices, wants to ignite thoughts about what the true purpose of school is, displaying the modern day public school education as a factory to create a mindless population of students.

School, everyone summons different thoughts and connotations whenever they hear that word. Although people range in their opinions of school, many can agree that schools all have the same goal: to educate their students. This is proving to be false; John Taylor Gatto provides evidence of this in his essay, “Against School.” Within this text he explains how schools are not educating students to be the best they can be, instead teachers are teaching them to become role players in today’s society and to be desensitized from their natural creativity. Gatto, a three time New York Teacher of the Year, has had his fair share of teaching. Gatto provides evidence to the audience that they have been wrong all along about the way a school functions. His ideals prove that the schooling systems in today’s society are not what they seem; schools are thought to develop and help a student unlock their full potential but through the evidence that Gatto provides us he shows that the education system does anything but that. He shows us this by appealing to the audience’s logos and pathos or their logical and emotional natures.

Concluding his writing, Gatto offers a fix to the traps of forced schooling. He advises to, instead, educate children to be independent leaders, speaking for themselves and within themselves. Throughout his years of teaching in the public schools, he finds geniuses are everywhere. Despite schools drilling and managing kids, Gatto believes the solution is to let kids manage themselves.

At the start of 2016’s new school year, approximately 60.4 million children will attend public elementary and secondary schools in America (National Centre for Education Statistics, 26 July 2007. Web). With so many children going through compulsory education every year, it is important to ask questions about the purpose, structure and success of the education system, so people can be made aware of areas that may need improvement. John Gatto is a teacher and author in America who argues that the education system here is not designed to educate its students like most people assume, but instead, to keep them in line and maintain the current social hierarchy. He begins his article, ‘Against School’, by recounting his time as a school teacher in Manhattan, explaining that the students and teachers always seem to be bored. He asserts that boredom is a symptom of childishness and that the reason students act this way is because schools are designed to prevent children from maturing and growing up. Schools do this to make sure students grow into predictable and easy to manipulate adults. It is clear from the amount of supporting evidence John Gatto is correct; the school system exists to create a conformist obedient population and it does so by reducing creativity, over medicating children, and dividing students in order to maintain class hierarchy.

In his article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto submits his conspiratorial beliefs apropos the suggested chicanery and skulduggery present in American school systems to a wide range of audience members, ranging from concerned parents to the worldwide educational community. Throughout his article, Gatto calls into question several aspects of the modern education present in the United States, his scathing and unnervingly well reasoned timbre astonishing readers into reassessing their own experience in the education system. These appalling points, which one may at first believe only exist to steal the attention of any reader, are a key strategy in Gatto’s article which allow readers to set aside prior notions of skepticism towards educational

Every year in the United States there are many high schools students that do not graduate and receive a degree. The United States curriculum for students in public education has slowly declined, and continues to do so. Students are required to learn information that is confusing, useless, and boring. They are also learning how to be accepted into society, independence, and stepping beyond only thinking about themselves. John Taylor Gatto is a speaker, consultant, writer, and a retired teacher of twenty-six years who studies and analyzes students and their learning abilities and learning environment. One of Gatto’s more popular essay on these issues is “Against School”. During his twenty-six years as an educator, Gatto watched and witnessed the decline of a public school education and the issues that caused it. This brought him to write informative and argumentative essays about public schools and the level of education. Gatto uses rhetoric in his essay “Against School” to give the audience a visual idea of the struggles students and educators face. Gatto uses his writing to question the public school education and to demand a change from students, educators, and public school officials. Gatto proposes that anyone can make a difference in the way in which public school education is being taught and the responsibilities that come from and fall on the students and educators. In “Against

Melinda Gates once said, “kids are falling through the cracks and nobody notices it. That to me is what's wrong with the school system.” The American school system claims to want every child to thrive, but teachers give up on students they feel are not worthy of their time. In “I Just Wanna Be Average” by Mike Rose, Rose discusses how his school placed him on a certain path that eliminated his motivation and love for learning. The labels that brand every student make or break their educational careers. Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” depresses me as an alumna of a public school system. Having seen friends and classmates caught by the current of my school’s expectations, I know that students are put on tracks as soon as they step

Let’s do away with the school system. In “Against school, John Taylor Gatto says, “They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said that they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around” (Gatto 608). Gatto uses his article “Against School” to talk about how the school system is not necessary. He uses certain rhetorical strategies and personal experiences to do so. In “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto uses his personal experience in his thirty years of working in the school system and some rhetorical strategies to convince people who have children in the public-school system that kids do not need to be put in the system to have an education.

John Gatto’s “Against School” is a persuasive essay arguing both the ineffectiveness and negative outcomes of today’s public school system. Not only does Gatto provide credibility with his experience as a teacher, but he also presents historical evidence that suggests that the public school system is an outdated structure, originally meant to dumb down students as well as program them to be obedient pawns in society. Fact and authority alone do not supplement his argument. Gatto also uses emotional appeals, such as fear and doubt, to tear down the reader’s trust in the schooling system. Although it may seem to be so, Gatto’s argument is not one sided. He also offers suggestions to make the educational system more efficient at the hands of

John Taylor Gatto’s essay, Against School is the inspiration in which most of my questions and answers come from. Whether it is partly from the students, or the teachers, the overall schooling system needs to change to get students learning again, while maintaining good grades. As a high school student, in my first

In the essay, Against School, John Taylor Gatto, expresses his strong belief in middle diction of how students in the typical public schooling system are conformed to low-standard education in order to benefit the society much more than the student themselves; causing schooling to be unnecessary as opposed to education . He believes that children and teachers are caught in extreme boredom as a result of repeated material. This boredom also causes a lack of maturity and independence in the students. Gatto wrote this essay in 2003 which appeared in Harper’s magazine. He gathered these observations during his 30 years of teaching in the best and worst schools of New York City. In 1991, he was named the

The essay ‘Against the school’ by John Taylor Gatto draws our attention on to all the cons of attending twelve years of high-school. Gatto has experience in teaching profession for twenty-six years in schools of Manhattan, he shares from his experience that he majored in boredom and could see that everywhere around him. He also points out the initial reason why schools came into existence and what the purpose it fulfils now. He also educates us on the fact that all the great discoverers never attended school and were self-educated.The main idea Gatto addresses in his article are that public schooling is doing the youth an injustice.He implies that the purpose of schooling, now is to turn children into good employes and someone who follows orders.

In the attempt to persuade his readers in “Against School: How public education cripples our kids, and why”, John Gatto relied on his passion for education to express his thoughts. Having a bad experience as a teacher in our current school system, he believes that our system isn’t what it should be. He believes that our kids aren’t being educated. With the use of frequent rhetorical questions, personal experiences, and an appeal to ethos using other respectable men’s work, Gatto clarified his points about our schools in the America.