Article Analysis: From the Land of Frankenstein by John Taylor Gatto

Mark Twain once observed that a cat that jumps on a hot stove, it will learn a valuable lesson and in the future will not jump on hot stoves. Twain wryly points out that the cat will not also jump on cold stoves, either. The lesson it learned - -just as humans learn - - rather than make informed distinctions, it becomes easier to simply avoid the situation altogether. In John Taylor Gatto’s article, “From the Land of Frankenstein,” the former award winning teacher condemns the integrity of the American public education system, asserting it. In actuality, focuses more on training students for obedience rather than attempting to develop each individual’s talents and abilities. The American public education system destroys individual initiative in order for students to become more manageable parts in the overall social order in the country accomplishing this goal by rewarding compliance and discouraging individuality and ensuring dependant and obedient response to authority through curricula enforces students to respond passively to governing entities, and finally punishing those individuals who resist or refuse to assimilate the lessons with escalating levels of negative reinforcement. How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum, or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn, or deliberate indifference to it.” Our schools need to teach the values of free speech and individualism. Why do they continue to provide teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, or Abraham Lincoln who were big on freedom for mankind? But contradict by not allowing our kids express themselves openly. Dr. King once said “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Our children need to be taught the values of being able to make right choices and to be an individual. The dictation of curriculum should not be governed more or less be standardized by those who say they are looking out for our best interests. Our schools are plagued by bureaucracy and financial problem and have become factories that pump out unequipped people. We not only fail to hold individual students accountable for poor performance, we have also failed to hold the entire government-controlled school system accountable for its performance as well. Curricula are increasingly dictated by the federal and state governments. Trouble is that what exactly goes into the curriculum is a political football, as are the standards that students must meet. As a result, we wind up getting an education system that emphasizes a one-size-fits-all standard that has little or no relationship to anything other than what is politically popular at the time. The political correctness demanded by the school boards in Texas and California has resulted in nationwide dilution of textbooks. The other problem is with inflexible curricula set by state and federal government is that it doesn’t accept that students have different interest, dreams, and talents. As a result, we wind up forcing kids with no aptitude or interests in science to take four years of school. As stated in John Taylor Gatto’s (From the Land of Frankenstein), “The children of wealthy and privileged families were to be educated in private schools and furnished with the training to become the nation’s leaders in industry, the military, and government while the children of poorer and less influential families were to be grist for the work force. They would be schooled in such a way as to prevent the vast majority from ever entertaining thoughts of leadership and to, instead, grow complacent, if not happy, with being followers ever willing to sacrifice and die for the elite. Of course, they could never be told this truth; instead, their indoctrination would involve propaganda of the worst sort that inspired the type of patriotism that never questioned the sagacity of political decisions or the right of the ruling class to dominate them. Indeed, boys and girls in America were transformed and continued to be into little Frankenstein monsters bereft of cognitive thought or decision-making. They would march blindly to the rhythm of whatever drum the ruling class would beat. We might say that there is no harm done by learning something like this, except for one thing there is a massive opportunity cost here. Why not allow those kids to spend mo