Schooling Vs. Education

Chapter 2 - What Is a School and What Is It For, by Denisse Escarcega

John Taylor Gatto: Schooling Is Not Education - Part 1 of 5



Chapter 2 brings up a question that fascinates me both as a teacher and a student – what IS the difference between education and schooling? Mark Twain’s quote, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,” really got me thinking. How much are schools supposed to teach to their students? How much do students learn outside of the classroom? Is one type of education more important than the other? Should both types of learning be separated, or is there a way to bring them together? I came across an interview of John Taylor Gatto, an award-winning teacher and author, which I thought tied in very nicely with this topic. His thoughts on education and his approach to teaching are quite shocking and thought-provoking in the sense that he pushes students and teachers out of the comfort zone that we have gotten used to in the typical classroom. I would never dream of putting a couple of teenage girls in a truck-driver’s care for a day, but if I stop to think about it I realize that those girls probably learned more in that day than they did in a whole year of sitting in a classroom. This makes me wonder if I’m depriving my students of powerful learning experiences and opportunities by playing it safe and sticking to routines that I am comfortable with. We tend to teach the way we were taught, but are we doing a disservice to students by doing so? Mr. Gatto brings up some very powerful statements in this interview. His comments on how we are all lonely living in networks, not communities, was really interesting. I often think about the popularity of social networking sites and how we all interact with each other in a very isolated way. I also liked his thoughts about how we reward talkers – we pay “talkers” well and we admire people who are good talkers. This makes me wonder how we can go about creating and rewarding thinkers, instead. It’s easy for some to talk without really thinking, but it’s not so easy to get people to think. Mr. Gatto’s thoughts on how schools are creating people who are useless to themselves and to others as well as his thoughts on how schools are a sorting mechanism that create a caste system, complete with “untouchables”, was quite jarring. These are not things that we want to hear, much less admit to being true, but what if he’s right? How does this happen? How can we change it? Overall, I felt this interview was very effective at getting me to stop and think. As an educator and a student, I can appreciate the importance of that even if I was a little uncomfortable with hearing what he had to say.

For more information about John Taylor Gatto and his work, go to http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/.