Personal Responsibility in Education

School in America is a stuffed animal. Shot dead on arrival but preserved by elitist taxidermy, we cling to the fallacy that it is alive and well. If anyone who cared witnessed the totality of my high school (or middle or elementary, for that matter) career, they wouldn’t have let me graduate. Not only did I learn next to nothing, I barely did anything. Teachers were apparently satisfied with dull essays lacking insight, obviously BSed or copied homework, and intelligence-insulting lies I fed them to keep my 84% in their class. That was the game I played for all of middle and high school – see how long it takes them to notice that I’m a house of cards. Around the time I turned 17, however, I realized that no one was about to tell me to stop playing – that I could, in fact, play the same game the rest of my life without anyone noticing. Before I knew it I had college acceptance letters and a high school diploma, and an extensive contemplation set in. It culminated in the astonishing realization that my life, and consequently my education, is my own responsibility, and that I must stop waiting for anyone to help me advance either one. John Taylor Gatto, Michael Moore, and Jean Anyon all suggest exactly what my friends and I gradually became aware of in high school – that the public school system is rife with inequalities and deficiencies, only guaranteeing reproduction to replacement for the unskilled labor force, rather than encouraging innovation to change the world. Anyon and Gatto reveal the hidden pretext of the American public school, and Moore and Malcolm X explore the elitist avarice preventing things from improving.

John Taylor Gatto’s neo-Prussian explanation of the purpose of our school system is startling in its factua...

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...colm discovered, bit by bit, the vastness of this world and the knowledge we’ve extracted from it, and uninhibited by elitist-dominated society, drew conclusions starkly similar to Gatto’s and Moore’s and Anyon’s. He found that “the way things are” on the outside had little to do with the universal knowledge he acquired on the inside. He found that knowledge is power. He found, most importantly, that only he could give himself this knowledge and hence this power – that education was his own responsibility. And as a young student, I am beginning to understand this myself. That is why I take classes through non-profit organizations, and use my free time exploring nature. There is no guarantee that the system ordained to help us is actually going to help us, and the only way to ensure a secure future is to keep learning, keep conquering, and keep evolving on our own.