Between Gatto and Bradbury, they both tell that society is purely using school as a way to control people. In Gatto's writing he cites other authors and draws a parallel to the Prussian system of education, "an education system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life,to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens- all in order to render the populace 'manageable'". This point is echoed in Fahrenheit 451. On page 60, Montag's captain, Beatty, is explaining how they manage to keep people in line, keep them from thinking for themselves; " You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle".
Gatto provides examples from other writers and thinkers who also trace back our system of education to Prussia. Gatto cites authors such as H.L. Mencken and James Bryant Conant. One man in particular whom Gatto quotes is Alexander Inglis. Gatto lists Inglis' six functions of our schooling system; the adjustive or adaptive function, the integrating function, the differentiating function, the selective function, and the propaedeutic function. One of the six functions that I found very interesting was the first function, adjusting or adaptive. In the explanation of the function, Gatto writes, "Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgement 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".
As for Bradbury, he uses the characters of Beatty and Clarisse to explain the society in which Montag is living. Clarisse gives Montag her view of the schooling system telling him how the students do little learning and rarely ask questions. Beatty allows for the reader for gain a better insight as to why and how this occurred. After burning a woman along with her house, Beatty visits Montag and describes the evolution of society which led to the state is in during the book. This evolution is caused mostly by the twentieth century, when everything becomes faster, including books, which were extremely shortened. This led to a decline in schooling, " School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored...Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?"
Both of these images of society appear to be real, at least to me. I feel as though Inglis' six functions are an accurate depiction of the public schooling system, especially the adjusting or adaptive function because if you compare the topics that we learn in school to what we could be learning, it is confounding as to why we're stuck in a rut re-learning the same things year after year, which few people use in their lives after graduating anyway. Just ask any high schooler if their parents can help them with their home work...most likely they can't, and thetas because the topics learned in school have little to no relevance in everyday life. With Bradbury's argument, you can see the same decline in education now as Captain Beatty explained to Montag. Not that school has been shortened, but compared even thirty years ago when my parents went to school, discipline has been relaxed greatly in schools. Also, the use and mechanics of English have been consistently neglected, especially in the lower levels of education, meaning children have little to no concept of how to correctly put a sentence together, and if they can, they have no idea why, or the parts of a sentence. For spelling, a heavy reliance on technology such as spell check reduces the need to actually know how to spell words, since if you can sound to out, the computer will probably figure out what you're trying to say, and fix it. This decline in education and the use of public education to control the masses is setting society up to become similar to that of Fahrenheit 451.
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