Horace Mann Against Schools Summary

Two Opposite Perspectives of School In the article named “Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education” by Horace Mann, the author explains that school is an integral step to prepare for students to be aware of the responsibilities of becoming good citizens. On the other hand, the text “Against Schools” by John Taylor Gatto emphasizes that the role of the school system is not necessary in society since it forces students to go to school and sit around in classes for a certain amount of hours for twelve years, but many students feel useless and bored with the school curriculum. Although Mann makes a good point when he says school is important for student’s future, I must disagree with Mann and agree with Gatto because of my own educational
In Gatto’s text, the author mainly describes about his interpretation of school’s attendance, which does not efficiently work with the majority of students. / In his “Against Schools;” Gatto central argument is about school’s attendance, which does not efficiently work with the majority of students. I agree with Gatto when he says that going to school does not simply mean that students fill up seats in classes and have to study compulsory subjects, which are seen as students’ routines every single day (Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 143). In my opinion, if there is no change in the school curriculum; it means students are given the same lectures in the same mandatory subjects from year to year, making generation of new students the same as the previous ones. Instead of being lectured to memorize the contents of mandatory subjects, such as geography, history, and literature, which are uninteresting to many students, including me, students should have more opportunities from schools to help them figure out their real passion and then be encouraged to pursue it. An early preparation for students’ careers will always make
As Gatto, an expert in boredom, explains, “…if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it.”(Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 142) Why would students answer that classes made no sense to them? There are two primary reasons, which are because of teachers and students. The first reason is that teachers mostly do not have different teaching strategies, so some students could not understand lessons because the way teachers give out information is ineffective with the way these students prefer to study. Some students are visual learners while other students would rather learn from normal lectures. For instance, some students tend to easily understand lectures if the lectures combine videos or pictures since these things help students to imagine what they are learning from teachers. The second reason is that students do not relate to subjects in which they are not interested. I believe that many students always get the feeling like they are forced to digest dry subjects like history and literature. As an illustration, when I was in the tenth year of high school, I got only three out of ten points in my third in-class writing exam about a poem in my literature class because I did not have enough deep ideas to analyze a poem as my