Against Schools

When reading John Taylor Gatto’s “Against schools”, I found a lot of rhetoric. The passage begins with pathos. He gets his readers to feel for the children and teachers in school that are bored by making them remember their own feelings of boredom. There is also a sense of fallacy to an authority in the context that this guy was New York City Teacher of the year and New York State Teacher of the year so he obviously knows what he is talking about when he says that there is a problem with the school system. As a reader you want to just automatically believe him for obvious reasons without actually thinking about it for yourself. He also makes a comment which leads me to believe that he does not think very highly of George W. Bush. He says, “Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"?” He makes fun of the fact that George Bush hardly ever says anything right and if he does it is by accident. He is mocking the President (Former President, but when this was written he still was in office). Another thing that the author does is use big words. I think that he feels that the use of big words kind of comes with the territory. Since he is a teacher, he should know big words, and therefore since he knows them he should use them. He uses words such as jettison, resilience, autonomy, banal, satirist, paean, propaedeutic, and several others of which all of them I had to look up. And in the end of this passage he tells readers that in order to make their children really great, they must teach their own children several skills that are not taught to them in schools.