Why School And Learning Have Become An Entity Of Strength

In his article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto submits his conspiratorial beliefs apropos the suggested chicanery and skulduggery present in American school systems to a wide range of audience members, ranging from concerned parents to the worldwide educational community. Throughout his article, Gatto calls into question several aspects of the modern education present in the United States, his scathing and unnervingly well reasoned timbre astonishing readers into reassessing their own experience in the education system. These appalling points, which one may at first believe only exist to steal the attention of any reader, are a key strategy in Gatto’s article which allow readers to set aside prior notions of skepticism towards educational

Theoretical Perspectives and Contexts of Language Developments are discussed in this chapter of Beverly Otto’s Language Development in Early Childhood Education (2014).

In his article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto criticizes America’s system of schooling children, arguing that the whole system is bad and unfixable. In the majority of the essay Gatto relies on personal anecdotes, historical examples that do not correspond with modern day society, and bold unsubstantiated claims. Due to this, instead of convincing parents to take their children out of school and rethink our societies schooling structure, he just leaves the reader confused over what the problems he’s criticizing truly are.

“The more you read, the more things you know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” This is how Dr. Seuss thought of reading, and I think of it in much the same way. Literacy is everywhere and influences us every day, therefore, it plays a major part in each of our lives. I believe that reading is an interactive activity in which learning happens, or as Clay (2001) defines it, “…a message-getting, problem-solving activity” (p. 1). Reading is the process through which one reads information and from doing so, constructs meaning about the material. The more exposure and practice one has with reading, the more knowledge one gains. In this paper, I will begin by discussing my own personal educational philosophy, then continue by stating and explaining four of my beliefs about the reading process and the research that is found to support each of them before sharing the remaining questions I have about literacy. I am an existentialist, and a strong supporter of a balanced literacy approach. My beliefs about literacy come from these foundations and perspectives that I embrace. For students to be successful in their literacy development, I believe that identity acceptance in the classroom is crucial, instruction for all students must be differentiated, direct and explicit instruction is at times necessary, and vocabulary is a significant component in the ‘Big Five’ of children’s literacy development.

Let’s do away with the school system. In “Against school, John Taylor Gatto says, “They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said that they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around” (Gatto 608). Gatto uses his article “Against School” to talk about how the school system is not necessary. He uses certain rhetorical strategies and personal experiences to do so. In “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto uses his personal experience in his thirty years of working in the school system and some rhetorical strategies to convince people who have children in the public-school system that kids do not need to be put in the system to have an education.

In his article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto satirically poses several questions concerning the purpose, structure, function, and need of the current educational system in the United States. Utilizing anecdotes from his thirty years of teaching experience and extensive research on the historical origins of many modern school customs to justify his tantalizing arguments, Gatto rhetorically inquires about the true motives and rationale behind an outdated institution system which continually steals more than a dozen years of precious life from millions of Americans in the pursuit of furthering a prejudicial class-separation bound together by conformity.

School, everyone summons different thoughts and connotations whenever they hear that word. Although people range in their opinions of school, many can agree that schools all have the same goal: to educate their students. This is proving to be false; John Taylor Gatto provides evidence of this in his essay, “Against School.” Within this text he explains how schools are not educating students to be the best they can be, instead teachers are teaching them to become role players in today’s society and to be desensitized from their natural creativity. Gatto, a three time New York Teacher of the Year, has had his fair share of teaching. Gatto provides evidence to the audience that they have been wrong all along about the way a school functions. His ideals prove that the schooling systems in today’s society are not what they seem; schools are thought to develop and help a student unlock their full potential but through the evidence that Gatto provides us he shows that the education system does anything but that. He shows us this by appealing to the audience’s logos and pathos or their logical and emotional natures.

Some people might like education, others might dread it and really don’t see a reason to continue learning about it. Today, for teachers and professors it’s easy to them to tell how the education they teach is effective for an individual student. As we know, education is being taught at school, home, and a little of both. For America today, most children attend preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle school, high school, and college. Depending on the pupil's career choice, it can take up to 20 or more years completing their schooling system, Usually, during the middle and or high school years in America, professors teach you valid things pupils will be using in life.

John Taylor Gatto, who was a teacher at the public school for twenty-six years, and the writer of the essay “Against School” that first appeared in Harper’s magazine in 2001, censures the American Educational System in his argumentative essay. Gatto argues that the demands of schooling are essential problems. Gatto shows some positive examples, and models of the ‘success without forced modern schooling’, and he insists that historically forced schooling is not related to intellectual and financial success. James Bryant Conant encourages reader has interests in modern schools, which is the result of the ‘industrial revolution in nineteenth-century’. Moreover, Alexander Inglis’s study of modern schooling in the Gatto’s essay supports and helps the idea of John Gatto’s writing. Gatto develops his idea compared with “schooling” and “educating” based on personal teacher experiences, and demonstrates why the American Educational System needs a better solution, which is “educating” for a bright future to children, and descendants.

In order for students to be actively engaged in school, they must be proficient readers and writers by third grade. After grade 3, instruction shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Students who, by the end of third grade are still struggling to read, may continue to have academic difficulties as they progress through future grades. These students become disengaged from learning. In Constante’s, interview with Wilm (Constante, 2011), Wilm suggests that in order to engage students in school, time is of the essence. “So the time consideration is this: there’s a certain amount of instructional time available in a school day. If you want to be sure you do not have 25 percent of students falling through the cracks by the end of Grade 3, you need to make sure these children are getting the instructional time they need. These students, the bottom 25 percent, need direct instruction in phonics. Some of them have good language skills, so once they learn to decode words, their reading skills develop quickly (Constante, 2011,). Other research suggests that below level readers need 100 to 150 hours of additional instruction in order to decrease the learning gap. Students can be disengaged for various reasons. Some students, who are proficient academically and socially, are just disinterested in school. Other disengaged students may have good behavior in the classroom, but they are low academically and require remediation of skills. Finally, some disengaged students have poor behavior because they have poor academic skills. Students who fall in the last category are students who require the most attention from teachers and administrators in school (Constante,

For many decades now there has been a scope of definition for what “literacy” incorporates and those are the basics skills like reading, writing, and a variety of social and intellectual practices which involve basic communication skills, and hand and eye coordination. However, with the world of technology continually growing, and the level of diversity in the student population becoming vaster it has become necessary to also include speaking, listening, viewing, and visually aspects to the curriculum. One of the best ways to address a wide range of literacy is to pair the categories with each other based upon their connections in the real world. The categories include written language (reading & writing), spoken communication (listening & speaking), and visual language (viewing & visually representing). (Standards for the English Language Arts p. 6) Many of these can be done with a range of creative activities such as students being able to choose what they write about, share their own personal experiences in their writings, and then read them together; this helps the students stay engaged in the work they’re doing, and also increases their level of retention of the material. The importance of a student being engaged is best explained in the article “Adolescent Literacy: A Policy Brief” with, “The number of students who are not engaged with or motivated by school learning grows at

Many people have impacted education over the course of time. In history it has taken outside thinking to change or break the mold of the current system set in place. Education is no exception to that rule. Education has changed in many different ways since it was first started. One of the ways education has evolved is how it impacts the society it is a part of. School today is seen as an institution that produces productive citizens for the society it is a part of. However, when education got its start it was simply to control unruly children and teach them how to obey the authority above them. It wasn’t until around the 1880’s and the 1920’s that things started to change. One of the key contributors to this change was John

Since the establishment of America’s first schools, the American people have disagreed not only about what the purpose of school is, but also about what schools should teach. Initially schools were supposed to “prepare men to vote intelligently and prepare women to train their sons properly. Moral training based on the Protestant Bible would produce virtuous, well-behaved citizens [who knew not only] the three R’s but [also] the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government” (Kaestle, 1983, p. 5). During the 1780’s educational theorists began calling for reform and in 1785 Massachusetts law

From a baby 's first word to their first complete sentence, there 's a lot to debate with their language development. The average child has a vocabulary of up to six-thousand words by the time they turn five years old (Brighthubcom, 2016). Language development is one of the most critical roles for an educator in both early childhood and primary settings. It is this ability of language development that is particularly interesting in the nature vs nurture debate. In order for educators to provide effective communication, it is important that they have the knowledge and understanding of the four key concepts of language, such as phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development and the underlying theoretical perspectives that explain the processes of language acquisition and development.

My philosophy of literacy is centered on providing a learning environment rich in authentic literature, instruction that is engaging, fun, and balanced, collaborative, and also involving families in the child’s education. My ultimate goal of literacy instruction is to help children become lifelong readers and writers by providing the skills necessary to comprehend, construct, and make meaning of text, speak, and write. (Torgesen, 2002). According to the National Reading Panel, there are five essential components that must be taught in effective reading programs: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. (Reading Horizons). According to Konza (2014), reading instruction should be changed to six foundational reading elements, adding oral language and early literacy. I also believe that early literacy should be