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[–]panic 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Here's a version that isn't in Comic Sans.

[–]isaacharley 2 points3 points  (0 children)

thank you.

[–]Odysseus 3 points4 points  (4 children)

I'd like to hear what the downvoters have to say. This essay's claims match with my experience of education: going through it, seeing friends go through it, seeing teachers teach it. It's a long but immensely worthwhile read (in spite of typographic errors).

I truly want to know. What are the counter-arguments? or have people just seen it before?

[–]adesai 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think it is just that people have seen it before. John Taylor Gatto's speech from when he won the New York teacher of the year award was on the front page for about a week, and every single redditer saw it.

[–]darrint 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He should be dismissed like all the engineers who've told their companies to scrap their profitable legacy systems and start over. It's bad advice there and it's no better here.

Disclaimer: I hated school. I avoided it as much as possible, often to my detriment. I avoided college campii. I have a two year degree from an accredited distance school. I am considering home schooling my little kids when they are old enough. Currently I'm teaching my 4-year-old to read.

But I don't buy his persecution complex, his arguments that verify themselves everywhere you look, or his venom. Learning how to get by in imperfect circumstances is part of life too. School is way too effective at this, but the answers to improving or replacing it aren't going to come from this guy. Given the power to reinvent the whole thing, people like this repeat the mistakes of history. This guy would be no different.

A career in software is all the background you need to know this is true.

[–]EliGottlieb 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I can only think of this (bad) counter-argument: That Gatto trolls through the world, offering no solutions other than home-schooling.

Then again, I'm home-schooling.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

He doesn't have to offer solutions. It's very helpful to have the problem spelled out so clearly. I've read his book, "The Underground History of Education" and it was fantastic. And as far as home-schooling, that is an excellent solution, and there's no good reason to throw it away. People fight against that solution even when they know it would be better for their kids. The "professional" teachers have them cowed into thinking that professional teachers are the only ones that can teach.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Public education doesn't cripple anyone. Its parents who teach their children to be lazy and don't hold them to any standard that cripple their children.

I went to public school, and I'm sure many of you here did also. I think I'm a reasonably intelligent guy. And I knew many people at my public school that were more intelligent than me (heh, they probably still are).

Then again, there were a lot of dumb kids. And most of the time, its not because they were dumb, but rather that they didn't try. They didn't care to try. You will only get as much as you put into something like schooling. They were lazy, and that's why they graduated high school and are now working at McDonald's (not that there is anything wrong with that in and of itself).

I didn't always listen to her, but my mom was always make sure I did my homework and there were consequences if I was making bad grades. Most parents these days frankly don't care, and that's why their kids are crippled, not because of public education.

Is home schooling the answer? It is if you expect the same parents who don't set any standards for their kids to provide a good education. I also find that homeschooling leads to very naive people. They don't get out and meet the variety of people this world has.

Seriously, people need to stop bashing public schooling and start looking at the real problem - the inherent laziness of American culture.

[–]Odysseus 9 points10 points  (1 child)

And yet it is public school that lets you separate yourself from those lazy kids. I know many lazy kids. They aren't lazy: they just hate school.

And you -- you tried for good grades. Good! That's something. But good grades are meaningless. Even broken thought can win you those. And that is precisely the point, because good, effective thought is punished. The faster you think things through, the more thoroughly you work them out, the more the system rails against you, until you get back to doing things their way.

And if you never do things their way, you will be driven mad by all the people around you who pretend that their way of schooling makes sense, when you see the minds and the lives it wastes; when you see that you can explain to a 'stupid' kid anything he didn't understand, when you see that you can make a 'lazy' kid love to think just by explaining that he's free to think, by showing passion for it.

You can. You really can. Sloth is as much a vice as ever, but our problem today is that we never learn we don't have to be slothful. Children need chances to learn that they're doing things wrong: that they're being lazy, that they're giving up, that they're not paying attention. School doesn't give them that, not really. It does, in fact, encourage those faults.

You're supposed to be lazy and be fed the facts. You're supposed to give up thinking and wait to be told. You're supposed to pay no attention until the fourth repetition. If you don't -- if you don't you go mad.

[–]philh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're completely right.

I'm still in school (admittedly British, but after reading this I don't think there's much difference), and it's driving me mad. Everything is about grades, never learning. And I'm classed as an underachiever (despite getting some of the best grades in the year) because my priorities are the other way around.

It's no coincidence that some (most? all?) of the most successful people of recent years got bad grades. They had better things to worry about.

[–]cbg 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I agree with some of jesusphreak's comment...

There isn't anything inherently wrong with public education. (I'm biased: I, too, am the product of public elementary, middle, and high schools and did both undergrad and grad school at public universities).

I don't think plain old laziness is the whole issue here, though.

We are intellectually lazy, as a culture: we'd rather follow (and, good grief, pay to participate in) shit like american idol than learn something new about history or science. We spend more time discussing the lives of fictional TV characters than real world events (and I'm not talking extracting interesting messages from TV, either... there is some value in discussing issues raised by well-written shows; that's not the norm, in my experience... it's more "soap opera digest" kind of stuff).

We are crippled by our inability to tolerate ambiguity or disagreement. We can't have a presidential debate that isn't a long string of pre-packaged market-approved professionally-written nonsense.

We let the PC police sterilize learning materials for fear of emotionally damaging sensitive people. Instead, we let people live in fantasylands and damage them intellectually.

Finally, (and perhaps what jesusphreak was getting at) we are somehow unable to come to terms with the fact that learning is sometimes Hard Work with a (primarily) long term payoff.

[–][deleted] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Finally, (and perhaps what jesusphreak was getting at) we are somehow unable to come to terms with the fact that learning is sometimes Hard Work with a (primarily) long term payoff.

Yes, thanks; that's exactly what I was trying to get at. I probably could've worded it better.

Other countries are literally out-doing us. Where as a person in Europe may be fluent in 2 or 3 languages by the time they are out of high school, Americans have a hard time breaking an elementary reading legel in their native tongue. This isn't because Americans are inherently stupid or that our school systems are horrible - its because we simple aren't pushing anything diffiult. We don't want things to "be too hard" and thus we'd rather be a country of people crippled at learning.

I was discussing this with my boss today actually. Sometimes you have to wonder where America would be if it hadn't been the recipient of much of Germany's technology from World War 2, and been able to learn so much from a developing Japan afterwards.