English Argument Essay: John Taylor Gatto and Michael Moore
The Essay needs to have an argument: Essay Prompt: In "Against School", John Taylor Gatto argues that American public schools are "laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; it's real purpose is to turn them into servants" (Gatto 149). In "Idiot Nation", Michael Moore laments the involvement of corporate America in the public school system, while also addressing other failures of school policies and approaches. In what ways are Gatto and Moore's critiques similar? How are they different? What changes is each writer advocating? Does Moore's view of schools support, challenge, and or complicate Gatto's critique? Essay Format Guidelines: 5 pages, Double Spaced Use 12 point Times New Roman Font Cite all your sources according to MLA citation Here is where you can find the two readings: For John Taylor Gatto's "Against School" can found on the book of "Rereading America" by Gary Colombo 9th edition from pages 141-149. For Michael Moore's "Idiot Nation" can be found on the book of "Rereading America" by Gary Colombo 9th edition from pages 121-141. "Rereading America" by Gary Colombo. The ISBN is: 1-4576-0671-2
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English Argument Essay: John Taylor Gatto and Michael Moore
Every ardent American book reader has come across the disseminating works of John Taylor Gatto in ‘Against School’ and Michael Moore in his ‘Idiot Nation’ critical assessment of American education system. They deliver harangue to the purportedly inefficient, retrogressive and frivolous, if not floundered, American education system with their farce-imbued literature (Carpenter 158). This paper critically aims at examining ways through which Gatto and Moore’s critiques are similar.
John Taylor Gatto chides the fact that schools have become boring with the perpetual routine six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years of conditioning schoolteachers and students into compulsory programs. He laments that nothing new is learnt other than the casual subjects in within structures rigid like the system itself, which is only interested in grades other than educating. Gatto terms schools as virtue factories of childlessness that promote qualities other than curiosity, adventure, resilience by giving kids the autonomy to invent and takes risks occasionally (Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 126).
In support of his critical view, John Taylor gives reference to eminent and revered personalities who ostensibly did not pass through the current education system but were capable of rising to their positions. Such personalities take account of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln whom none graduated from secondary school. He goes further to quote the likes of Farragut; inventors, Edison; captains of industry, Carnegie and Rockefeller, Melville and Twain and Conrad who were writers and scholars like Margaret Mead (Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 137).
The point Gatto tries to put across is that success is not utterly dependent on compulsory schooling, but intelligence is acquired through educating oneself. Quoting the reputed satirist H. L. Mencken, Gatto proclaims that the current education system is not one to foster knowledge and awaken intelligence, but one that fester breeds and trains standardized citizenry to curb against dissidence, dissent and originality. He enunciates that the ill with the system is its provenance and importation from Prussia, the now annexed country as part of Germany, a country that was the aid of Washington during the Revolutionary war with most of its citizens, largely German speakers, seeking asylum in the USA. Congress later considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws in 1795 and adopting Prussian culture of education system (Carpenter 160).
According to Gatto, with reference to Inglis, the education system of compulsory schooling in Prussia was intended to curtail the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. The system undermined the prospective unity of these under-classes, a prospect that also favored America, who looked to create not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force, but also a virtual herd of conforming mindless consumers, as great numbers of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be made by cultivating and tending to such a herd via public education and advertising (Carpenter 178). In an economy of mass production, vast fortunes were to be made by invoking necessity and mass consumption organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or a family farm a situation which Gatto blames on mandatory schooling that instills towage and trains kids to think they need to consume nonstop, and that leaves them vulnerable slaves for another great invention which is the modem era – marketing strategy (Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 143).
In a caustic vitriol manner, Gatto summarizes the aspect of America education system as one that teaches easy divorce laws other than the need to work at relationships; easy credit other than the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment other than the need to learn to entertain on...