WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State teacher of the year who now advocates ending compulsory schooling in favour of a different model of education. His website, spinninglobe.net, has a number of articles written by him in which is puts forth lucidly, coherently and persuasively his arguments for ending the present system. I want to have a closer look at his arguments over this series of posts… 
In Against School, Gatto writes talks of boredom - the boredom he witnessed when teaching ‘for thirty years in some of the worst schools of Manhattan’. He comments:
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
Ah well, one could claim, the world is a vastly different place from the figures from history that he gives as examples. There’s a certain minimum standard in so many different areas that young people need to be up to in order to be employable. But is this really the case? Is ’six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years’ really necessary? It all depends, I suppose, on what you see the purpose(s) of schools as being.
Gatto quotes Alexander Inglis who in his 1918 book Principles of Secondary Education outlined the six purposes of modern schooling’ which he believed followed a Prussian model:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function: Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function: This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function: School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function: Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function: This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function: The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
If one takes these six functions of schooling as being true, then compulsory education is about a lot more than simply preparing young people for the world of work and the business of life. It’s about creating and preserving communities, inculcating values, and training people for their ’station’ in life (to some extent). Although this has somewhat of a Brave New World ‘alphas, betas and gammas’ ring to it, there are no doubt elements of truth to be found in it.
The problem as far as I see it is that the values that need to be inculcated, the traditions, ideas and norms that need to be passed on are in a state of flux and have been since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. Postmodernism has relativised all knowledge, values and opinions with no-one individual or community being able to justifiably (under its tenets) claim universal truth or knowledge. This leaves society in a constant state of unease and uncertainty with an inherent and fundamental tension which is exhibited in education. Parents want their children to be educated in much the same way they were (so they feel comfortable with it) and yet have an ‘up-to-date’ education. What happens therefore, is that small adjustments and tweaks are made to a system which was initially set up in 1870 (at least in England). Yes, there are ‘revolutionary’ changes such as the introduction of comprehensive education and the establishment of the National Curriculum, but these are few and far between and are a lot more conservative than the propaganda that surrounds them would have you believe.
Towards the end of his article Gatto gets a little more radical:
…we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants…
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
A seemingly triumphant end, but perhaps not one which is economically sustainable, as Gatto himself notes. I suppose the worry is that if everyone is ‘educated’ (if 50% of the population hold degrees?) then who’s going to clean the toilets? The immigrant population. Which then causes further problems. Educational issues and problem never occur in a vacuum - they’re always related and tied to wider societal problems. The solution to one problem may be ending compulsory schooling, but there’s no such thing as one, ideal, universal answer to all problems in today’s world, unfortunately… 
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