John Gatto Against School Summary

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Modern Media, Compulsive Schooling, and Their Effect on One Another It is the shared opinion of Diana Kendall and John Gatto that American culture is dominated by uninformed citizens who are the product of compulsory schools and the manipulation of mass media. This idea forms a dialectic between citizens who believe everything they read, and sources of media who profit off of their ignorance. The elaborate framing devices used by mass media go unnoticed when public schools mold students into consumers who are not taught to question their sources. An argument made by Gatto in his essay, “Against School” is that the habits that students learn in the compulsory school system carry over into American society after students graduate. Although compulsory schooling is not the only cause of American ignorance, it may be the root of it. Compulsory schooling is education by repetition in an attempt to make trivial facts into muscle memory. Some…show more content…
The cultural perceptions that Kendall points out are not necessarily bad media. She simply means that journalists have the ability to frame the news in such a way that shifts the perspective of the viewer. In her essay, Kendall contrasts the notion of “civic journalism” to that of journalists who manipulate stories to get a specific response out of the viewer. Civic journalism is the idea that journalists and reporters have the ability to inform or mislead the general public. Moreover, it is the responsibility of the journalist to empower the public with useful, informative news. Civic journalist’s supply relevant and important news for the general public; while there is nothing wrong with framing a story from different perspectives, this technique becomes damaging when reporters directly change the perception of the viewer, especially when that perception is better than
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