Week Two, Readers Response One

 In “Against School,” an essay written by John Taylor Gatto, the author critiques the American public secondary school system. The author offers a harshly negative appraisal of our public school system. It is a conclusion I think most would support given recent rankings of secondary students' test scores world-wide, but the essay concerns less the evaluation of American students' performance itself, but greater the cause of their performance. Gatto argues that the system that mandates and supplies the education criticized intentionally “dumbs down” American children for the purposes of creating a docile peasant class. I found his rhetoric stirring, but his evidence flimsy, and his supporting claims ultimately self-defeating.

One of the first and weakest defenses presented is that school is not necessary at all. He lists successful Americans who did not attend public secondary school. But these facts bear no relevance to the consequences for students who did attend secondary school. Where I think it obvious that not every student benefits greatly from public high school, it would seem like a stretch to suggest that the education of our children would be enhanced by closing all public high schools, because they should do better. Gatto doesn't explicitly suggest this, but it's the next logical step in his model.

Next, Gatto compares the American secondary school system to Napoleonic Era Prussian military academies. His support for this claim seems weaker still. Gatto describes military aides to George Washington during the American revolution, and the fact that some regions of the United States had German Speaking populations. But these facts once again do not support the idea that our secondary schools would be modeled after something that existed an ocean away in space and two hundred years ago in time. All those constraints aside, the lack of any record of such a plan leaves this claim speculative at best. The next best support mustered is the vague assertion that James Bryant Conant and Alexander Inglis found such a model appealing.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in this argument is the massive and monolithic government infrastructure that would be necessary to perform such an agenda. It is difficult to imagine a government agency in which all administrators would be unified in the intentional production of a servile proletariat. To call it a conspiracy theory would be an understatement. Further, all of those educators and administrators complicit in the stiffing of creativity and genius would themselves have to be of the class they were repressing.

I think its clear that public secondary school education is not a national priority in this country, and it fails many students. Young Americans with little chance at higher education are also more likely to fall into an unskilled labor class. But Occam's Razor holds that the simplest explanation tends to be the most likely. Isn't it more likely that we don't incentivize our teachers properly to attract the best educators? Isn't it more likely that our curriculum is stale and regimented to provide a road map for our less talented teachers? Isn't it more likely that great teachers get easily frustrated by mediocre administrators?