What Gatto and Freire would agree on

      Both John Gatto and Paolo Freire would agree that the public school system is not built to teach children to become an individual, but rather to become part of the mass production of robot-like citizens who are seemingly brainwashed into thinking they must be a certain way in order to be successful. In his article “Against School”, John Gatto mentions that America’s public school system is really adopted from Prussia. “What shocks,” Gatto says, “is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable."” He talks about how our youth are bred to become a “servile labor force” and a “virtual heard of mindless consumers.” Like Gatto, Freire expresses similar concerns. In “The banking concept of education”, Freire describes students as “containers” and teachers as “narrators.” He talks about how students are trained to receive, memorize, and repeat without ever understanding the true significance of what is being taught. Freire states, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” He deems this banking concept problematic as is does not allow men to have the opportunity to truly become human. “It is men themselves,” Freire says, “who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.” He explains that the beneficiaries of the banking concept are the oppressors, who in Freire’s words, “care neither to have the world revealed, nor to see it transform.” This compliments Gatto’s claim that we are trained to hide our personal talents, abilities, and intelligence because “we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.”

      Freire and Gatto would also agree that because of this monotonous schooling system, students have become bored, uninterested, and terribly unenthused. Gatto addresses this matter right away in his article. As a retired school teacher, he recalls boredom being everywhere in his world. The students would express the fact they that the work was stupid and that it made no sense. “They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around.” Gatto says. He explains that the educators were struggling just as hard as the student to find any motivation.  “The teachers were every bit as bored as they were” he says. Freire’s writing relates to this topic as he talks about the contents of the teachers narration being lifeless and petrified. He bluntly states, “Education is suffering from narration sickness.” He explains that teacher’s today are simply “filling” the students with information that is unimportant or “alien to the existential experience of the students.” He says that by teaching this way, we are depriving the students of critical knowledge that would be of more significance to them in their lifetime. Freire’s suggested solution to this problem is to create an education system that utilizes “problem-posing education.” This would basically mean the teachers authority is no longer effective towards the students, thus the students and teacher would be on the same level, be able to work together, and have an equal relationship. Freire says: “In order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it.” Gatto states a similar opinion when he says “The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”