John Taylor Gatto
Gatto's take on the pedagogy of the American school system is that it is isolating and takes away a person's individuality by making them part of the system. They are trained to have predictable reactions to authority, compliance. He states that school is anti-life by restricting kids with little sense of the future and past connectedness because everything is determined by the next bell or the next course. It reduces them as people because they are given very little time for themselves when many of the hours are dedicated to schoolwork. The kids of this system are passive, spoon fed, and that is the result of how the system was formulated, to make them passive and indifferent.
In some parts I do agree with Gatto's take on school's affect on the individual, I don't think it makes them afraid of intimacy because students still very intimate in this day and age, at least the kids in this school, because the school is like a community and for the most part, the kids in our school aren't excluding in any way to other kids. So I don't think we fear intimacy too much. Many times its the opposite because people often give full disclosure of themselves with things like twitter, facebook, blogging or vlogging.
I agree though, that it puts limits on the individual in some ways.
"School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up."
I think this part of it is true because when you take away responsibility from a child, they will start to act like a child in our sense of the word. Like Peter Pan, who has never grown up, he has no responsibilities. I think the system was able to achieve its purpose and in some ways its rather brilliant how well it has done that by doing these basic things. In other countries like Japan, the schools in small towns give children as young as five, tasks and responsibilities such as wood carving and washing dishes. The kids don't get hurt (as so many adults seem to fear) and they're responsible because they're used to the work. In the past the people of our age are doing "adult" work at soon as they entered their teens they were considered adults and they acted like it too, because they had to. They were given responsibility. But the kids today are babied and as a result act like babies too. In school we have to follow an authority, so we learn how to do that as well.
Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire states that the problem with schooling is in which the authority figure sees to themselves as the narrator, to pour their words into the students, who are the receptacles. Because schooling is seen in this way, Freire says it is not not natural because it presents information in a way that is unrelated to the real world. Students come to see this form of knowledge in a way that is not connected to how related to how the world operates. To Freire this way of teaching is a form of nepotism, "love of death" instead of coming from a love of life, because it treats knowledge like it is a static thing, which it isn't, it grows, is re-invented, is continuing. This form of teaching Freire says expects students to be, passive containers to await the teacher's words, because that sort of behavior is rewarded by being considered good students.
I think that rote memorization, in some ways are helpful for things such as math and once you have learned all those equations, you can move on to practical applications but not before or else you won't understand what you are doing. Other things like language are better learned by doing and experiencing, which have more of a learning curve. I think when we are young like in elementary school, it can't be helped that teachers will treat us that way, because we are learning from them. The role of authority comes in play too, because we are taught to listen to adults from a young age which continues on till when we are older (which we can see from the Milgram Experiments, which best exemplifies how compliant people are in the face of authority). This way of teaching can be bad because its expected of students to learn from teachers, as solely the pupil.
Lisa Delpit
Her Method of teaching is to adapt to the student's circumstances that they are from and adjust her teaching methods to them.Gatto's take on the pedagogy of the American school system is that it is isolating and takes away a person's individuality by making them part of the system. They are trained to have predictable reactions to authority, compliance. He states that school is anti-life by restricting kids with little sense of the future and past connectedness because everything is determined by the next bell or the next course. It reduces them as people because they are given very little time for themselves when many of the hours are dedicated to schoolwork. The kids of this system are passive, spoon fed, and that is the result of how the system was formulated, to make them passive and indifferent.
In some parts I do agree with Gatto's take on school's affect on the individual, I don't think it makes them afraid of intimacy because students still very intimate in this day and age, at least the kids in this school, because the school is like a community and for the most part, the kids in our school aren't excluding in any way to other kids. So I don't think we fear intimacy too much. Many times its the opposite because people often give full disclosure of themselves with things like twitter, facebook, blogging or vlogging.
I agree though, that it puts limits on the individual in some ways.
"School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up."
I think this part of it is true because when you take away responsibility from a child, they will start to act like a child in our sense of the word. Like Peter Pan, who has never grown up, he has no responsibilities. I think the system was able to achieve its purpose and in some ways its rather brilliant how well it has done that by doing these basic things. In other countries like Japan, the schools in small towns give children as young as five, tasks and responsibilities such as wood carving and washing dishes. The kids don't get hurt (as so many adults seem to fear) and they're responsible because they're used to the work. In the past the people of our age are doing "adult" work at soon as they entered their teens they were considered adults and they acted like it too, because they had to. They were given responsibility. But the kids today are babied and as a result act like babies too. In school we have to follow an authority, so we learn how to do that as well.
Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire states that the problem with schooling is in which the authority figure sees to themselves as the narrator, to pour their words into the students, who are the receptacles. Because schooling is seen in this way, Freire says it is not not natural because it presents information in a way that is unrelated to the real world. Students come to see this form of knowledge in a way that is not connected to how related to how the world operates. To Freire this way of teaching is a form of nepotism, "love of death" instead of coming from a love of life, because it treats knowledge like it is a static thing, which it isn't, it grows, is re-invented, is continuing. This form of teaching Freire says expects students to be, passive containers to await the teacher's words, because that sort of behavior is rewarded by being considered good students.
I think that rote memorization, in some ways are helpful for things such as math and once you have learned all those equations, you can move on to practical applications but not before or else you won't understand what you are doing. Other things like language are better learned by doing and experiencing, which have more of a learning curve. I think when we are young like in elementary school, it can't be helped that teachers will treat us that way, because we are learning from them. The role of authority comes in play too, because we are taught to listen to adults from a young age which continues on till when we are older (which we can see from the Milgram Experiments, which best exemplifies how compliant people are in the face of authority). This way of teaching can be bad because its expected of students to learn from teachers, as solely the pupil.
Lisa Delpit
"I have found from working with both pre-service and practicing teachers, they have to be extremely open to their students. Their hearts need to be open. They have to know how to observe and listen to their students. More than just having strategies they need to find out about the children and their parents. I call this ethnographic teaching.Teachers can create a curriculum based on strengths rather than weaknesses, then they are teaching to their student's needs. "
She doesn't think that kids should be subjected to the "basic skills" curriculum because that is exceedingly slow and kids find it boring. "Not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own ‘expertness’ as well" I agree with this statement because I was once in a class where it operated like this and the whole time I was just wondering why it was going so slow, because in the previous grade, the teacher was able to teach more material in less time and the students where still able to fully comprehend it. In elementary school, my third grade class was the hardest out of 4th and 5th because it was the most challenging and I actually liked it the most. I kept noting the difference in pace in 4th and 5th grade in comparison which seemed too slow. So I imagine for other kids, if kids are placed in "basic skills" curriculum it'd be even worse. In third grade my teacher always said, "no child is stupid, they're just lazy" and he was right in the context of the typical American student, which we all were/are. That was motivating to me because he was saying you guys can do this if you just try. It wasn't out of reach.
"while being helped to acknowledge their own ‘expertness’ as well"
Delphini says that kids have to feel like they're learning something or else they'll feel cheated, this depends on the child, but in general its true, though kids rejoice whenever there is a substitute with the actual teacher they expect to learn something and get something out of it. If they learn they are able to do something then they're more willing to do it.
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