English Argument Essay: John Taylor Gatto and Michael Moore

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English Argument Essay: John Taylor Gatto and Michael Moore
Every ardent American book reader has come across the disseminating works of John Taylor Gatto in ‘Against School’ and Michael Moore in his ‘Idiot Nation’ critical assessment of American education system. They deliver harangue to the purportedly inefficient, retrogressive and frivolous, if not floundered, American education system with their farce-imbued literature (Carpenter 158). This paper critically aims at examining ways through which Gatto and Moore’s critiques are similar.
John Taylor Gatto chides the fact that schools have become boring with the perpetual routine six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years of conditioning schoolteachers and students into compulsory programs. He laments that nothing new is learnt other than the casual subjects in within structures rigid like the system itself, which is only interested in grades other than educating. Gatto terms schools as virtue factories of childlessness that promote qualities other than curiosity, adventure, resilience by giving kids the autonomy to invent and takes risks occasionally (Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 126).
In support of his critical view, John Taylor gives reference to eminent and revered personalities who ostensibly did not pass through the current education system but were capable of rising to their positions. Such personalities take account of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln whom none graduated from secondary school. He goes further to quote the likes of Farragut; inventors, Edison; captains of industry, Carnegie and Rockefeller, Melville and Twain and Conrad who were writers and scholars like Margaret Mead (Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle 137).
The point Gatto tries to put across is that success is not utterly dependent on compulsory schooling, but intelligence is acquired t...