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Our Price: $11.95
Product Details
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| Shipping Weight: |
0.50 |
| Author(s): |
John Taylor Gatto |
| Vendor: |
INGRAM |
| Publisher: |
New Society Publishers |
| Published: |
April, 2002 |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0865714487 |
| Store Code: |
4197 |
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Genre: Philosophy of education; General; History; Education / Teaching; Education; Philosophy and Social Aspects; Education / General;
Average Review: 4.5 stars
Review: Institutionalized schooling, a prererequisite for the modern workplace : John Taylor Gatto's assessment of modern public schooling methods is all the more pertinent in light of the many years he spent as a teacher. This book essentially consists of several speeches he presented at award ceremonies at which he was presented with teaching awards. Gatto points out that the public schooling apparatus serves to teach bureaucratic structure, rather than content. The form and structure always take precedence over the individual. Students exit the public schooling assembly line even more intellectually and psychologically dependent than when they entered it. This isn't an accident. While students learn things like how to read, perform arithmetic, etc., what they truly learn, above all else, is how to adjust in order to fit into a vastly dehumanizing system, as well as how to dehumanize others "below" them within the power food chain. They learn to put aside individual interests, talents and the innate human love of learning to make room for absorbing what others would direct them to learn and parrot. They learn to organize their daily lives into little slivers deemed valuable by those in authority, to passively submit to an unjustified authoritarian hierarchy and to substitute lived experience and understanding with carbon copies. In short, students learn how to be a externally-directed people with no individual, personal understanding or sense of intrinsic human worth outside of "the system." In fact, the objective of modern institutionalized schooling, according to Gatto, is production of valuable worker bee drones with "marketable skills" for the modern workplace-- people who submit to systematized authority without asking questions or rocking the boat. One reviewer referred to Gatto as "cynical." I am not sure how encouraging a restoration of faith in the individual and the child, as opposed to rigid synthetic systems and institutions, could possibly be considered "cynical" on a human level. However, there is no doubt that this book is an assessment of the issue, as opposed to a book of feel-good solutions. This book is an excellent first step to understanding the inherently flawed institutionalized schooling system that produces citizens who are unable to think critically and ask important questions.
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