difficulty paper-"Against School" John Gatto

John Gatto’s “Against School,” is about how Gatto has spent his last 30 years teaching and realizing that most students and teachers in America’s educational system is bound by boredom. He compares schools to prisons and students to mindless drones who only work for the grades or who fail the system. Gatto explains that teachers become bored because they were once those students and they are also part of the problem. John Gatto questions why we even have schooling, “Is this deadly routine really necessary?” If Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Carnegie, and Rockefeller didn’t need an education to become successful, then what’s the point. Gatto’s brief history lesson on how our educational system is a model of 19th century Prussian system is quite interesting. Using the words from a harvard course, Inglis, it breaks down the purpose of our schooling into 6 points. Gatto is very serious and is convinced that our educational system, limits, destroys, conforms, and selects our children and does not allow them to grow as individuals, as they were taught in 19th century Prussia.
Gatto’s article is an excellent piece and comes across with many points and examples to prove to the reader that our “schooling” is boring. However, I would disagree with almost all of this article. I don’t understand how Gatto has changed or what he’s done to change his opinion of our educational system since he spent 30 years being an educator himself. Gatto gave good examples of how men like Ben Franklin succeeded, “unschooled...but not uneducated.” That’s great. I still believe that we need our schooling system for structure and as base for our futures. These men are a dime a dozen, not everyone is a prodigy waiting to be discovered, students need fundamentals to be most successful in their careers. As for school limiting, sure, there are certain forms of limitations a school can have that might hinder students. However I feel that our educational system is changing and is allowing for more individuality and choice in schools.