Reading Response: The Case Against School

Another English class. Not everything was a massive essay. These ‘reading responses’ were just a couple pages at a time. Easier to digest, but harder to parse, with less context baked in. This was my take on some esteemed educator who was trying to argue against the roots of American schooling. Regardless of whether or not he had a point, he was trying to make it with a crummy argument.

John Gatto writes on the troubling underpinnings of our public education system and the harmful effects of its influence on children. His generalizations at first strike a subjective chord, appealing to a collective perception that the quality of the school experience today is in some way less than it used to be. Unfortunately, the moment he reaches the core of his argument, that we are being undermined by foreign influence, he fails to see its merit disappearing before him. That he presses onward regardless makes it difficult to take him seriously from that point further.

To be fair, his reasoning is not entirely unsound. If our school system is based on a Prussian model that valued domestication, one can assume it would produce a subject class. Arriving directly at the conclusion that we’ve re-created Prussia however requires one to gloss over some key questions. First as to the association made, what crime did the Prussians commit beyond begetting the German culture that followed? The presentation of the Prussians as a poison well is unfounded, and calls into question the subjectivity of the writer. His chain of research is a question as well. An essay from 1959 that then only hinted at a single volume from 1918. With a supporting anecdote from a Golden-age satirist. Were I as a student to submit a paper with those as my key sources, I would deserve the lousy grade to follow. He points to a waning work ethic in modern society, but what took so long? Entire generations have been indoctrinated and the fruits of that have only just recently begun to ripen? Was our confidence in Prussian efficiency unfounded, or were we just doing it wrong? 

The elephant in the argument is Gatto’s professed victimization by a workplace fraud. This revelation raises concerns of a bias that would answer those earlier questions with an indifferent shrug, and raises additional questions. If the system is so morally suspect, aren’t the author’s credentials as well? Those ‘Teacher of the Year’ awards are fruit from the same poison tree (grown from that poison well, natch) and Gatto just another sour grape. The author’s experience with public education becomes no more laudable than my own, and I made it through all the standardized testing with at least enough upstairs to get when someone is just itching to even a score.

In his conclusion, he raises yet another important question. The “solution” as he describes it is essentially one of good parenting. If that indeed is all that’s necessary, then whyever the concern for schooling in the first place? The harmful effects of education would only become known if the quality of parenting were on the decline, but Gatto makes himself perfectly clear that the villains here are the Prussians, not the parents. Opening on an emotional cue served his purpose well; he had my attention as he began making his case. If only he’d had a case to make, he might have kept it.