"Against School" Reading Response

I love to read. I always have. I read boring things and interesting things, things I remember and mostly things I forget. Lately, I read a lot of critical things- about the government and its leaders. I’ve learned to scan over those oh-so-prevalent expressions of opinion and form my own hypothesis based on what I already know and see. But somehow Gatto’s article “Against School” struck me differently than the rants on the back page of the weekly alternative newspaper. I found myself so excited by the points he was making, so surprised to find that someone, somewhere, had put into words what I had somehow suspected to be true all along, that I nearly emailed the article to my family and friends. I still might.

That sounds geeky, I know, but it has to do with how I was raised. Due to my health, I was unable to attend public school until grade eight, at which time I myself begged my parents to let me enroll. Up until that point, my brother and I were “homeschooled” or at least that’s what we learned to call it. We rarely did anything at all which resembled the arbitrary notion of school most our peers and their parents referred to. We played outside, we read random passages out of encyclopedias for fun, we watched OPB and we cooked with our mom. We were read to at night and slept in as late as we wanted in the morning. It was hardly an ideal environment for fostering intelligence. And to be sure, when I finally entered Junior High at thirteen with no notion whatsoever of how to factor equations, I felt stupid. But I also had experiences much more valuable than the kids around me. I wasn’t used to holding my teachers in near religious reverence, so we related on a more human level. I had never before been punished for getting up to relieve myself without permission and it seemed dehumanizing. And finally, the phenomenon of being “too smart” or “over achieving” would have seemed nearly comical had it not come with so much stigma.

Gatto’s article addressed all these areas and many more. From briefly looking over some of the other responses to this essay, I can tell it was not generally well received. But that seems to prove exactly Gatto’s point. Most children who are taken through a compulsory schooling and spit out, after 12 years, at a point where they can finally choose what they learn and how they learn it, are wholly unprepared to think of their education as anything but obligatory. Having worked very hard myself to get back into school, but not having a classical history in the school system, I can see how “critical thinking”- the type of processes encouraged in higher education but rarely in a mandatory schooling, is key to becoming an educated and well rounded person. But it can only be achieved after the method of thought we have learned from our k-12 education has been abandoned. I don’t think Gatto is really “against school”. I think he is simply against dogmatic thought and its propagation in America’s public school systems. But his point was made and it, incidentally, made me very glad indeed to be back in school at all.

Kate S.