John Taylor Gatto wrote an essay titled Against School in which he agrues that the public education system is failing students

John Taylor Gatto wrote an essay titled Against School in which he agrues that the public education system is failing students

John Taylor Gatto wrote an essay titled Against School in which he agrues that the public education system is failing students. Gatto starts off with a phenomenon, no matter what students and teachers all feel bored. Then he begins to talk about creats this boredom, our education system. He pomits out the concept “unschooled” and “uneducated”, and demotrates some examples that people can still be successful with having a formal school education. Afterwars, Gatto explains three major reasons that are accepted by society about why we need school and how the school system builds someone up step by step. However they are other who opposed this idea and think that school is a factory and destroys our children. Finally Gatto teaches us how to rightly face the school system and to have an open mind. I agree with Gatto on the fact that the American school system is failing students. There are many problems with the school system such as leadership does not always support second-order change, education budgets aren’t always flexible enough to support the cost or sustainability of innovations, and Current and traditional instructional methods leave students less engaged and less inclined to take ownership of their learning. Thankfully with these problems, there are many solutions to help better the education system.
One of the problems in the education system is that leadership does not always support second-order change. Those in potential leadership roles, such as teachers and librarians, are not always empowered to help effect change. Gatto mentions in his essay that teachers should “encourage the best qualities of youthfulness” but they can’t because they are the same product of schooling. There are cases in which teachers are there just because it is a job and they do not really care for the students and care about making a difference or care for setting an example to children. I have experienced this myself. I’ve had a teacher who did not really teach; all she did was powerponits and guided notes that went along with the powerpoint and if you dared to ask a question you were repremaned. She is a perfect example for a teacher who does not care to help lead second-order change. She was just there for the teacher discounts and paychecks. But we can help solve this problem by creating a framework, to be used in professional development, that would target and explain second-order change leadership discussions.
Another issue is that education budgets aren’t always flexible enough to support the cost or sustainability of innovations. I have not experienced this myself but I know of schools that can not get certain materials that could really benefit their school simply because the money is not there. A solution to this problem could be to build relationships with local businesses and career academies, and create incentives for companies to hire students, in order to create a revenue stream for schools. This such as sponserships were a huge facor at my high school it was why we could afford half of things that we had. Building relationships with companies benefits both the company and the school.
Current and traditional instructional methods leave students less engaged and less inclined to take ownership of their learning is a major problem with the education system. Times are changing and so are children. They same methids of teaching that were used a decade are not going to work in this day and age where children’s attention span is much shorter than what was. One my teachers senior really understood this concept because she did not just lecure and have us write on all day long. She went out her way to figure each student out and learn everyone’s leaning style and did lesson that would accommodate each student. She would powerpoints and videos for those who were visual learners. She would do activites for those who were kinesthetic type learners. She would have us write notes for tose that were linguistic type of learners. Variety is very important for children nowadays. Creating working groups, within education organizations, with the aim of advancing authentic student learning and leverage the internet to create online tools and resources that offer innovative teaching strategies to help engage students are ways to help solve this problem of using out dated teaching methods.
From John Taylor Gatto’s points of view, he believes that the staying in the American schooling system for so long has supplied him with every reason to refer to it as a childish program. He supposes he can bring out the best qualities in children by giving them autonomy to make decisions and take risks from time to time, rather than confining them to schooling. According to him, people may see the key problem of schooling as boredom which he argues as not only a problem but can also be the question, “Do we really need schooling?” I think that we do indeed need school but we need to change our ways to show that reading, writing and math are not the ways to become successful and stop trying to condition our children to follow the paths we have chosen for them but to let them choose their own paths.

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