Against School by John Taylor Gatto

      In this story called Against School, written by John Taylor Gatto, he compares school to the concept of boredom. "Do we really need school?"(149) He also explores this concept of the question if school is really as necessary as we make it. Gatto expresses how that students and teachers are both bored because students are being taught information that they already know, while teachers are bored because they feel that the students have bad attitudes and don't want to learn but just want good grades. The author tells us his own experience as a student and as a school teacher and felt the same way until his grandpa taught him when he was young that bored is a bad word and that he shouldn't use it because every person in the world can only blame themselves for being bored, and you can't count on other people to make things interesting for you. The author explains that he isn't against education but the school system. He doesn't believe in the five day a week and  long hours of class time system that we have. Gatto also goes on to tell about Alexander Inglis's breaking down "the actual purpose"(152) of schooling into six different functions. These functions are the adjustive or adaptive function, the integrating function, the diagnostic and directive function, the differentiating function, the selective function, and the propaedeutic function. The ideas of these functions include not teaching the students interesting things because "..you cant test for reflective obedience.."(152), to make students similar in as many ways as they can, determine the social role of each individual, leading students in the direction that they can succeed in (not any higher than that), to punish the students who don't succeed so that others can see and not follow in that direction to "wash the dirt down the drain"(153), and to train a portion of the students to learn to "watch over and control a population deliberately.."(153).
     I personally would have to disagree with the statement that we really don't need to go to school. I'm going to use ethos to tell you why this statement isn't true. Quite certainly My mom or dad would not have had the time to home school me as they were both working and going to school. If there wasn't a public school system they wouldn't have been able to afford for me and my sister to attend a public school and i wouldn't have received the education that has made me the person that I am today. I do see the authors side of the argument of how people who are home schooled have gone just as far and learned as much and probably more in a less amount of time than the average person who attends a public school. Although on the other hand i think school is not only important for education, but also for street smarts. If i had not attended school, i know i would be a lot more sheltered and not know all the socially important things that i learned from being around hundreds of people. Overall, i can say that the public school system is important mentally, socially, and physically. A lot of children, including myself would not received what they did at their schools at home.
    The purpose of Gatto's essay was to put this question in our mind of the concept, Is school important? Although he is making points about school being unnecessary or not as important as we make it , i believe his view is actually for schools. Gatto explains his different views on education and school systems, but that doesn't mean that he completely disagrees with the idea of school altogether. He says "We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women"(155). This means that as a society we shut down our intelligence and creativity body of people because our system doesn't run correctly as it should.