No Wonder I Can't Do Anything for Myself
The seven-lesson schoolteacher, as John Taylor Gatto simply puts it, teaches school. Despite beliefs and premonitions that children attend schools to learn something, Gatto explains how children are not primarily "acquiring general knowledge" nor are they "developing the powers of reasoning and judgment." This is how The Random House College Dictionary defines education. Instead, the lessons teachers primarily teach children between kindergarten and twelfth grade are confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and one can't hide. However, with intellect guided by M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley's Asking the Right Questions, one may find Gatto's theory to use illusive reasoning and misleading connections. Gatto asserts the seven lessons to be an unconscious absorption, a device implemented by the government, who are the real deceivers. A goal declared by the United States Department of Education (U.S.D.E.) is to "promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education" (ed.gov). Contrary to the U.S.D.E. mission statement, what Gatto believes to be the desire of the Unites States Government is "a curriculum [which] produces physical, moral, an
compulsory subordination for all," (Gatto) because a "society essentially under central control. Here Gatto associates homework with surveillance. The seven-lessons taught by schoolteachers across the United States are a myth created by John Taylor Gatto to arouse opinions about what school should be. Gatto says, "[I] punish deviants [who] resist what I've been told to tell them to think" (176). If you've ever tried to wrestle into line kids whose parents have convinced them to believe they'll be loved in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. To what numbering system Gatto refers to when he says, "My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own," (175) is unknown. Gatto believes that "students [should be able to] volunteer for the kind of education that suits them" (Gatto) and instead of the seven lessons students should "learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love - and lessons to service others too" (Gatto). Gatto says, "It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves to make meanings of our lives" (176). As for school, being training to regulate the poor, what about the children of rich families who attend, wealthy, publicly funded schools? Teachers present them with the same national curriculum of the seven lessons. Although Gatto has some strong assertions in his conclusion, his reasoning and evidence does not seem to hold true to the same mold. Homework is "schoolwork assigned to be done outside of the classroom" (The Random House College Dictionary), not surveillance. (177)Gatto uses a rhetorical approach complimented with value assumptions hidden beneath society's view of "bad children.
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