Stef Rozitis's Reviews > The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Someone has already posted a review that is very detailed and that I agree with. It's more coherent than mine is likely to be so take a look at it if you like: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I tried to keep an open mind that just because the author was overgeneralising from a US perspective didn't mean his analysis was completely wrong...but I was unable to have confidence in it ultimately. The writing is ideological with cherry-picked examples that are not well contextualised. He makes an excuse for his messy referencing at the end of the book, he quite sanctimoniously points out that if you want better referencing from him then you are proving his point about schooling. There's a circular argument right there and I would critique it even if it was less arrogantly expressed.

Gatto oversimplifies education, he presents it not as a perenially contested field but as something that has been dominated by the capitalist class. He also hearkens back to a supposedly golden age where kids educated themselves by osmosis (relying on the unpaid work of mothers which he thinks is a great system). All his examples of people this system worked for are wealthy, white, men. He claims no thinkers of significance have existed since schooling was unrolled (presumably except himself).

I’d have to agree with the critique of prefabricated teacher proof teaching resources (50) but he gives it a libertarian extreme that honours the individual and morally all questions are equal. He’s also naïve about kids who will not choose to read at all, or have not been taught, he argues that everyone will be the self-actualised liberal subject and choose books if you just take away the control of teachers and schools.

Seems ideologically confused. Doesn’t like standardised tests and measurements but criticised whole language for not being scientific enough. Both anti-drill and advocates for some forms of drill as a panacea for illiteracy. This sort of confusion would be more understandable if Gatto had not been a teacher himself. He seems to idealise a fairly brutal world (this is verging at times on the "school of hard knocks" cliche) and expresses the idea that schooling feminises the student (which presumably being taught by mum doesn't?). This put into context for me some things lecturers said in my education degree (they must have not been fans of Gato either I think). He spends a whole chapter (10) extolling his thrifty, industrious mother.

Some of the stuff- how schools are governed, the waste of money and mistreatment of teachers as far as I know is true (in the US) but he makes generalisations from this without looking at what is happening in other parts of the world. Instead of schooling them he would like to make them entrepreneurs and notable leaders (90) avoiding “political correctness” (89)

At times I seems like he confuses the effects of schooling (or a one-sided, exaggerated version of the effects) with the intent of schooling. More evidence would be needed to show this. His cherry-picked quotes from media articles also don’t prove as much as he seems to think (eg p115). You can’t deny there are very foolish and over-enthusiastic people in teaching (as elsewhere) and that journalists tend to go for the sound-byte not the nuanced opinion…but to claim this is representative is a bit much.

Overall I found his very emotional writing style hard to read, his method of sort of referencing but not really comes across as trying to dazzle the reader with his superior intellect rather than give real evidence. Like a stopped clock he is correct here and there but even then his analysis of a phenomenon he was observed is flawed. I was surprised at how little I liked this considering someone I have a lot of respect for loaned it to me.