Mike Vazquez
11/30/13
Essay 5
The Mass Production Of Obedient Citizens By The Education System
As Howard Zinn once said, “Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience… We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herd like people.”(1) Our education system needs a drastic reform because it educates us to be too obedient in society rather than intelligent.
Confucius, once said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I have been a student of the education system for almost twenty-one years now. I tried to become the best note taker, the best test taker, but now I have no idea what I want my purpose in life to be. My interest has been lost because I see every subject I study as work and I excel in every subject just to get that high GPA instead of learning. John Taylor Gatto, a retired schoolteacher and activist of critical compulsory schooling, stated, “We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that.”(2) We should feel embarrassed that none of us can imagine a better way to do things than locking ourselves up for hours in cells to come out thinking the same way from one another instead of striving to be independent, self- reliant and...