HW # 50 History(school)

Gatto – Against School

John Gatto, who is a retired teacher, describes the whole public school system in this country as if it was a factory that produces kids who can’t think for themselves because that is the whole idea. Schools are individual factories that control kids and teachers with rules and testing that kill kids’ curiosity and any ways of teaching that use teachers’ imagination. Gatto says that when the school system was started, it was based on German thinking about how to control the population and keep them from being rebels. The people in power liked that idea because they needed workers who would do the boring jobs and make other people and the country really rich. Gatto thinks public schools still do this. He also says that public schools are designed not to produce leaders who could cause trouble and that they are also designed to produce people who are great consumers. He calls them “sitting ducks” for marketing things we don’t need like SUVs.

Gatto says that the purpose of today’s public schools is still to create dumbed down citizens who won’t get together and start rioting or something to demand their rights and who will buy lots and lots of stuff to keep big business big. There are only supposed to be a few leaders who will be taught to keep the whole system going. At first I thought that maybe public schools today aren’t the way they are in a negative way (being boring and not trying to develop all the kids) because of evil (selfish) people in power. Maybe they are just out of date because no one has figured out how to change them. When I think more about this, I think he makes a lot of great points. People in power want to stay in power, and they don’t want trouble. People in power also want people who support them to make a lot of money to make the country wealthy. They don’t want a lot of people saying that SUVs aren’t safe and hurt the environment. Now we have Obama in power. It seems like a good time for people who want change in the public schools to make their case now. The things Gatto suggests like “being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then” sound like great ideas to me if I am understanding what he means. I think it’s a great idea for kids to pursue something they are good at or have a real interest in and be given the time to do that. It’s just that it takes some great teachers to help all the kids in a big class discover what it is they could get really interested in.


Gatto – The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

Gatto writes about how he gets awards as a teacher not for teaching subjects that will inspire and develop kids’ minds but for teaching school. He describes how he teaches school by doing what the “central control” wants him to do: 1. has kids stay in the classroom and know their place (smart class, dumb class, something in between); 2. teaches kids to react to bells like a trained animal (show some interest after the starting bell and then drop everything with the ending bell); 3. teaches kids to give up all their individuality and get permission for everything); 4. teaches them the importance of conformity to whatever study subjects and rules he decides; 5. makes kids understand their self-worth based on the evaluation of people who hardly know them or what they can do; 6. teaches them that they are always being watched and should have no privacy or private time.

The irony of this essay is that it is written by a New York State Teacher of the Year who is trashing the whole school system. He describes school as a prison where kids have a number and can’t move around and teachers are the prison guards, keeping them in line. The teacher is a dictator, and kids have to conform or else. As in his other article he makes the point that school is a place designed historically to keep the poor, the middle class, and any creative thinkers in their place. Important lessons like self-reliance and perseverance, and caring about others aren’t taught. Kids today are really doomed because when they go home, they have a limited life there too. They are not having time with their families or community members the way they did in the old days. They are mostly watching television, listing to Ipods, or going online – doing pretty passive stuff. According to Gatto, everybody should be glad that this is what kids are doing: just conforming and not developing much as individuals so they won’t rock the boat and will keep buying stuff I guess.


Gatto – Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech

John Gatto’s Teacher of the Year speech is like a proclamation demanding the death of schools in the U.S. Schools aren’t doing their job because we are 19 in a ranking of 19 industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. According to Gatto, schools only teach students how to take orders not how to think for themselves. They also create a caste system with homeless people at the bottom so they are a danger to society and to humanity. The combination of school and television for today’s kids is a special killer. Kids don’t learn how to teach or entertain themselves. They are dependent on others. Gatto says his students are also materialistic, cruel, and have no sense of the future. They live in a boring present.

This speech is so anti-school that it makes me think that Gatto was exaggerating to make a point. He talks about home schooling being a great alternative to regular school. And he says that home schooled kids are way ahead of other kids with their ability to think. Home schooling sounds like a terrible idea to me. First of all I think kids should be in social groups of people their own age. Second, many families don’t have a stay at home parent who can do the schooling, and many parents wouldn’t be great teachers. At times Gatto seems to wish it was the 1800s again when a lot of people lived on farms, and kids could have jobs on the farm and learn from adults. Some of his ideas about how to make schools better have been adopted by SOF like the community service requirement to get students out in the real world so they can learn by doing and the exhibitions, which are independent study projects where the students and have more say in what they are working on.


Freire – Chapter 2 Pedagogy of the Oppressed

This whole chapter, which was heavy reading to say the least, was making a contrast between the “banking” concept of education and the “problem-posing” concept of education. The “banking” concept is that the teacher just injects information in the student’s head, who just passively receives it, files it, and stores it. It is an extremely passive process. The “problem-posing” concept involves more of an equal partnership between the teacher and the student who have dialogues and think creatively about subjects to have a deeper understanding of them and try to think in new ways about them. The “banking” system is about memorization and accepting whatever the teacher says. People in power called the oppressors like the “banking” system of education because it trains people to accept the status quo. The oppressors hate the “problem-posing” concept because it makes minds question everything and could lead to the overthrow of them. The teacher who uses the “problem-posing” method of teaching is developing the individuality of students and giving them some power. The oppressors would say forget that.

This was sort of a philosophical criticism of the kind of teaching that produces conformists. That is the “banking” model where information is taken in but not explored or considered in a creative way the could give the student some real knowledge about it. The “problem-posing” model is more of an existential one, where as we actually learned, the student would be creating his own existence and his own humanity not just being an automaton, who is not really human because he or she is not really thinking for
himself or herself. I think the idea is that the only way society can get better is if there is a “problem-posing” education model used. Otherwise, nothing will change because the people in power want to stay in power.


Delpit – Silenced Dialogue

Dr. Lisa Delpit is a educator and writer who talks about the cultural conflict that happens for African-American kids because they don’t come from the “culture of power” that the schools operate on. She talks about how black children don’t come to school when they are very young having as many early reading skills as white children. They can be put automatically in a remedial program when they don’t need that. They just need a little of the teacher’s time to catch up, and they can do that quickly and stay in the same
classroom. She talks about the codes that “relate to linguistic forms, communication strategies, and presentation of self, that is ways of talking, ways of writing, ways of dressing, and ways of interacting.” Kids who grow up not in the “culture of power” are at a big disadvantage, and it isn’t because they don’t have their own rich culture. It is because the people from the “culture of power” don’t even think about its existence.

I understand completely what Dr. Delpit is talking about. Black kids do come from a different culture that has great strengths but it isn’t the “culture of power.” It think she is right when she says that even liberal white people don’t really want to talk about this fact because it is “uncomfortable.” They want everyone to be treated equally. But black kids do need a little extra help when they are very young, and it shouldn’t be separate remedial help. That makes it seem as though they are stupid or slow. They aren’t. They just need to catch up on some things they weren’t taught at home. Also, I thought it was interesting about the student in the writing class who didn’t just want other students commenting on her work. She said that black culture teaches you to be creative and improvise. What she wanted was help with structure. Cross-cultural understanding is obviously still not so great in schools.

Interview – Mr. Manley

Mr. Manley made the following points about his views on schools and education:
He prefers being at a school like School of the Future that isn’t a Regents school that deals in too much information injection.
He likes the idea of exhibitions and thinks they are way superior to Regents tests.
He went to Columbia Teachers College and learned progressive teaching methods
that are more interactive than methods that are common at other public high schools.
4. He likes to use comedic personality and experience as a comic to communicate as
a teacher.


Mr. Manley obviously is not a fan of the “banking” concept of educating kids, where information is poured or injected into heads and learning is a completely passive experience. He supports the “problem-posing” method of teaching that is more of a partnership with kids contributing to their own learning. He likes dialog in the classroom, and he can get more of it by being funny and getting the kids involved because they are having a good time. He encourages a lot of conversation in the classroom. He also moves around the room a lot encouraging every kid to participate.