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This great, short essay “Against School” targets modern, mass, mandatory schooling as an educational fraud, arguing that the real purpose of school is to divide, demoralize, and train youth for lifetimes as workers and consumers. In other words, to produce obedience and helplessness on an industrial scale. I think a second function, which the author does not address, is that mass mandatory schooling takes children away from their parents for the entire day, freeing up the adults for higher levels of work and consumption. Thus the “daycare prisons” we send our kids to every day help facilitate the “daily grind” that imprisons our parents in the rat-race of toil and buying that powers industrial production and profits.

How public education cripples our kids, and why
By John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hill,” which appeared in the September 2003 issue.

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: The said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

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