HW 46 - Research and Writing

Dumbing Us Down by John Talyor Gatto highlights the major problems behind the curriculum of compulsory school that school can never be parallel with education. Instead of learning given materials by the “experts” in a community that deals with participation and engagement, what teachers taught are the “seven lessons” that is behind the curriculum that will shape the students to conform to the social orders and economy for twelve years. Not only have that locked students in an institution as an “involuntary network”, it dehumanizes the students in varies of ways that they will never be fully human from the blockage of access to a real community.

This relates to my topic because Gatto reveals a very typical vision of the truth purpose of schooling. In the first chapter, he described the seven lessons that are being taught to students that is the “only curriculum truly learned” by students. Instead of telling the reader that school’s purpose are getting a good job, or for your future, Gatto went above all to tell the reader that school is really just a mechanical institution that makes people inhumane and to conform in a network, not community. Real education is to find the meaning in learning the materials in a way that make sense to your own life as combining transcendent and immanent. Although Gatto did not really criticize specifically what kind of subjects should be teach in school, he did map out the general issues that he saw from his thirty years of teaching focusing on the curriculum of compulsory schooling. Not only by pointing out the problems of schooling, he opened the readers’ vision to search for an alternative of the situation that is going on at school. He direct the students, parents, and teachers, to realize what they are doing at school might not be simply what they are, is way more complicated than just going to school and learn, or going to school and teach, or sending kids to school for a better future.

Sidenote: the seven lessons from the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling

1. Confusion (The natural order of real life is violated by heaping disconnected facts on students.)
2. Class Position (Children are locked together into categories where the lesson is that “everyone has a proper place in the pyramid.”)
3. Indifference (Inflexible school regimens deprive children of complete experiences.)
4. Emotional dependency (Kids are taught to surrender their individuality to a “predestined chain of command.”
5. Intellectual dependency (One of the biggest lessons schools teach is conformity rather than curiosity.)
6. Provisional self-esteem (“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests, is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.”)
7. One can’t hide (Schooling and homework assignments deny children privacy and free time in which to learn from parents, from exploration, or from community.)

One of Gatto’s ideas in the seven lessons was indifference. “When the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch….Bells inoculates each undertaking with indifference.” This portrays a typical life experience going to school, is to learn that nothing really matters. While students are enjoying their lessons and just got into the mode of focusing, they have to move on eventually and stop learning. Sure, people say we can come back to it tomorrow. But all these interruption will just ruin the environment to learn. Going to school is mainly to learn and keep our curiosity about the materials being given in relation to meaning of life, but it turned out that all students learn is conformity to the curriculum being given that shaped our habit to lose own individuality. The purpose of school did not only turn out that is to dumb us down, it also awake the ones who try to look for a better purpose to go to school to make an effort on making a difference about the school curriculum.

John Taylor Gatto did not really offer an optimistic purpose for students to go to school by telling the reader that’s what they have been learned (the seven lessons), but he did alert the readers that we shouldn’t just accept what school is doing to us but try to work together to make a difference. As my earlier topic question of searching for a satisfied reason to go to school, I realize that there is no such answer after reading this book, because school itself is corrupted by dumbing us down. “We have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time”. Gatto is arguing that each of us have the ability to teach ourselves and by setting ourselves to learn when we are motivated, we can learn way faster than spending more time at school, but less. By saying that, I am not saying that school is not the right setting, but the curriculum is the central impact on school that makes school a bad setting to learn. Students are the majorities that form the institution, therefore I do not believe school itself as a setting matters, but the way or habit we learn shaped by curriculum.

Although I do agree with Gatto's idea of spending too much time at school, I also doubt that by forming such freedom for students will cause them to procrastinate and form the inability to form multi-task. There is a chance that students will never feel like learning or never motivate themselves to learn. But in either way, I realize the main purpose of school is not simply to learn, but pick or modify the curriculum that best fits you in order to benefit yourself out of the most through schooling. Throughout the whole book, John Taylor Gatto did offer lots of the ideas that are true to me based on my own experience at school. But after all, who can determine what is best for every single student? By realizing these purposes of going to school to learn these seven lessons, I come to a conclusion that students should know what is best for themselves. Without the students, school is never an institution. Therefore, students should be responsible for finding their best way to learn other than just accepting what school has shape us into.