Group 1 Discussion on Gatto (Assignment 11/12)

Group Discussion on Gatto

Gatto's point is that every public school student is receiving a cookie-cutter education to shape them into average citizens. My group members and I agree with his point because we have had these kinds of parameters posed on ourselves when enrolled in public school systems.

Supporting Sentences

• "Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children." 
• "The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." 
• "By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness." 
• "Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.'"