Against School John Gatto Analysis

Education is the most important possession one must have as it is the only possession that cannot be taken away from him, and because it will open up the windows of opportunities. Therefore schools are considered as the best place for people to get an education, the best path to follow if one wants to have a valuable life, to achieve his goal. Going to school is considered as a top priority for countless people as they believe that with the education they will acquire will help them to get better jobs, to be prepared to the situations they will face on the outside world. Also, in a certain sense education through schools, colleges is the process by which a society accumulates knowledge, values and skills and transmits this cultural heritage

In his essay “Against school” John Gatto states from experience as a school teacher that the current education system is ineffective and make students bored as well as the teachers. Indeed on one hand the students are not motivated by attending to classes because most of them have either already cover the concepts taught or just don’t understand what is being taught. “They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around” (142).Therefore they come to believe that their teachers are not knowledgeable about the topics they teach and don’t understand their real needs. On the other hand, teachers also feeling bored to “reach students who are rude and interested only in grades” (142). Those who try to change the curriculum that are set in order to create a more effective teaching classes found themselves “trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children”(142). The problem of boredom of students at school is addressed by Sugata Mitra in his speech The child –driven education. Indeed through his experiment a hole in the wall, he found that “children will learn what they want to learn to do” (1). For him, if students have interest into something they will not have any problems to learn this thing, therefore they won’t feel bored. In this point, Gatto and Mitra share the same point of view which is if children are motivated to learn they will learn, if they are not they won’t. The issue is to find an appropriate way to identify what children are really interested by and to have time to spend to each individual students. There are many students in a single class and each of them is interested by something different. This problem is solved by the system of homeschooling, because the child receives extra help in the subjects he or she is having trouble in. If a child does not