Wesley ViolaEnglish 1

9/26/13Essay No. 2, Gatto

If School Sucks, Why?

“…to deal with this fatigue problem”. A small pause. “I’m sorry what was that?”

Louis asks, “What is meant by ‘fatigue problem’?” The woman responds, “The fatigue

problem is what was identified in the first quarter as being the marked decline in the

spirit, interest, and energy of the kids here at school, usually around noon or after lunch”

The PTA meeting loses its monotone atmosphere when a woman interrupts, “It’s

because of the lunch! They’re not being given enough time to eat!” She is interrupted by

a man, “No that’s not it, they’re being demoralized. You fill them with academics and

you don’t tell them who they are!” Most eagerly of them all, a woman comes forward,

“Excuse me – My son is definitely being affected by the fatigue syndrome and, in my

opinion, it's because of the competitive nature of this school, of the children, and -”

A few more possible solutions later Louis CK, with a bewildered look on his face,

speaks up saying slowly, “It’s school … right? I mean, school sucks … right? I mean,

you do what you can to, uh, improve it but it’s not, it’s – in the end there’s a limit

because it’s school and school sucks ... remember?”

This example, taken from the comedian Louis CK’s self-titled TV show,

illustrates a very definite idea of America’s schooling system. Educators and concerned

parents will eagerly discuss ways to improve the children’s quality of schooling, aiming

at the prospect that they all might be filled with academic interest, energy, and

enthusiasm. Fatigue or a disinterested spirit are signs that the children need more

physical activity, or more time for lunch, or more drama and arts programs. Once these

problems that detract from the children’s ability to fully experience school are removed,

they will thrive and the educators and concerned parents will have reached their goal.

Louis CK has a different idea of school. His point is that it is an inherently boring and

stifling system. When educators are trying to address problems with a school, such as a

“general fatigue problem”, they are really trying to alleviate the symptoms of the

schooling itself. Too little physical activity, lunch breaks, or arts programs are not giving

the children trouble so much as school itself is. School as experienced by Louis and as he

remembers others experienced it is by itself a tedious and faulty system.

John Taylor Gatto would agree. With thirty years of teaching experience in

Manhattan’s public schools, he is very much familiar with something like a “general

fatigue problem” affecting children today. The rigidity of school, he argues, often

sacrifices autonomy and, with it, the excitement and growth one gains from being self-

reliant. Instead of suffocating the children with assignments, tests, and lectures, school

would do better to “encourage the best qualities youthfulness – curiosity, adventure,

resilience, the capacity for surprising insight”(684). Schools also ensure that students are

taught, but they do not seem to ensure that boredom will not inevitably become part of

that process. And according to Gatto, it does – “Boredom was everywhere in my

world”(683). These factors can all combine to produce a system that stunts growth and

fosters a disinterested spirit, as Louis CK and Gatto both recognize.

But Gatto believes much more. The fact that any attempt to combat school’s

boredom is thwarted, a reality that Gatto says he has experienced firsthand, means that

school is not just boring, it has to be boring. In fact, he paints such a bad picture of

school that the only logical reason for its existence must be that it is meant, even

designed, to be this way. This is Gatto’s theory. For the better part of his essay, he is

arguing how the schooling system could possibly be intended to thoroughly bore and

stunt the growth of children, not just that it does have these ill-effects.

To prove this point, he spends most of his time analyzing the history of our

schooling system, speculating on the intentions of figures that had influence over its

development. Gatto is suggesting that education reformers like Horace Mann and

influential persons like Conant, the long-time president of Harvard, wanted deliberately

to bore and make stupid American public school children. There were men like George

Peabody that gave money to make this happen. Industrial magnates like Andrew

Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller also follow in this line of thinking. All of these

people, Gatto is suggesting, absolutely wanted their country’s children to become

mindless and mediocre human beings.

For this to be true, these people would have to be both unbelievably evil and

numerous. Their incentive and “evilness”, as Gatto says, is greed – they all “recognized

the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public

education”(pg 688). But this greed is not even on level with someone like Bernie

Madoff. The temptations that led Madoff to cheat promised fairly easy and quick money

– a Ponzi scheme is nothing more than just fraudulently moving money around – and,

once in place, the system grows by itself. Each greedy decision made by Madoff had

relatively little costs and was quickly rewarded, leading him to gradually create the

massive scam that he did. The greediness that Gatto is describing is on a completely

different level: not only would people like Horace Mann and Rockefeller have to put in

place an entire educational system that would dehumanize America’s future generations,

but their profit, the incentive driving this grossly immoral action, would begin to be made

in maybe 30 years - 5 years from the idea’s conception it might become a reality, 20

years from the educational system first being put in place the “trained employees” might

enter America’s workforce, and 5 years from this new influx of "obedient” workers

someone might start profiting from this inhumane idea they had 30 years ago. It seems

far too unlikely for so many people to make such a grossly immoral investment that

would pay off in almost half of a lifetime,. For Gatto to be right, too many irrational and,

honestly, faithless assumptions have to be made.

Though explicitly Gatto refuses to assign blame to anyone in particular for all that

is wrong with school – “Who, then, is to blame? We all are”(pg 683) - this essay, in the

end, means to do just that. If school is a system intended by a group of greedy capitalists

to make American children stupid and more docile so that “vast fortunes” can be made

off them, then they are entirely responsible for that system and its effects. If Gatto is

correct about Horace Mann’s and Rockefeller’s and other’s intentions, then they are

undoubtedly to be blamed, not us.

Even though Gatto finds too much individual greed and intent behind the

schooling system – we certainly shouldn’t believe that Rockefeller plotted to turn us into

his mindless, moneymaking sheep– he is right to worry about the consequences of

American hyper-capitalism and the attitude that it encourages. When he quotes a book

by Ellwood P. Cubberly, an influential figure in the development of our educational

system, - “Our schools are…factories in which the raw products (children) are to be

shaped and fashioned… and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to

the specifications laid down”(689) – he implies that Cubberly intended school to make

immature, addicted consumers out of public school children since “It’s perfectly obvious

from our society today what those specifications were…We have become a nation of

children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and

commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults”(689). It’s unreasonable to

believe that Cubberly had such evil intentions for America’s children. Writing during the

“Roaring Twenties”, a time when the American economy was booming, Cubberly must

have shared in the national spirit that America’s defining characteristic, competition-

driven industry, was something to be cherished and celebrated. Industrializing the school

system is a terrible idea, but at the time it must have seemed right since industry had

made America great in the first place. A hyper-capitalistic mindset, as seen in Cubberly’s

words and presumably shared by many of his contemporaries (including those individuals

mentioned by Gatto), is not evil, just misguided.

If as a society, we do believe that “‘efficiency’ is the paramount virtue, rather than

love, liberty, laughter, or hope”(688), then Gatto is right when he says that we are all to

blame for the issues that we face. Nobody is deliberately “turning our children into

servants”(690), but we do it to ourselves if we as a society believe that financial gain,

material comforts, and business “success” are the highest goals. Our schooling system

reflects and integrates these attitudes and if we are to really improve it, we probably have

to make a larger paradigm shift. No amount of PTA meetings, despite all of its high

hopes for possible solutions, will solve the school problem – if “school sucks” as Louis

CK says it does, then we have to change as a people before it can.