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Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

"This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor."

Having taught unruly 7th graders, I can tell you that the 6 things he teaches are necessary to control a large number of children. And yes, you need to control them, because otherwise the parents will sue you.

The unsolvable problem is that in this day and age, both parents work. It used to be that the mother would take care of the kids, but now they have to be passed off to a third party, who necessarily must take care of several times the number of children found in the average American home.

What kids really need- and do best with- is individual attention. There's no way to get that kind of attention with both parents in the workforce; the numbers just don't work out.

That's your real problem.

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Like a lot of these articles, the author is half-right: although schools aren't <em>designed</em> to make drones or conformists, but it can sometimes have this effect.

The real question is how one would redesign school in a <em>realistic</em> way to a) transfer knowledge to a large number of people who b) are compelled to be in class even if they don't want to be. The latter point is crucial: I'm a grad student in English lit, and the handy part about teaching undergrads is that if they don't want to be in your class or they don't like you in particular, they can try elsewhere.

Anyway, this article reminds me of an essay I wrote about the validity of grades: http://jseliger.com/2010/02/17/the-validity-of-grades . Short version: grades are problematic for all kinds of reasons. But there's no good alternative to them.

Gatto's argument goes a lot further than just education reform. He argues that schools - as we know it today - should be abolished altogether.

There are two other links at the bottom of that article. Read those, and you'll begin to see what he's getting at (that the school is a result of the capitalist need for workers and mindless consumers). The alternatives he offers, however, are rather scary alternatives to capitalism itself. Scary - at least - to me.

As for alternatives to grades: see pg's essay After Credentials http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

Like most of these articles, he's half-right.

There is certainly a case to be made that the U.S. school system was designed to make "drones or conformists":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

Or for a more detailed argument:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm

Use asterisks to get italic.

The unsolvable problem is that in this day and age, both parents work.

Usually links to the Onion don't belong on Hacker News, but in this recent case

http://www.theonion.com/articles/increasing-number-of-parent...

jest is truth.

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