My experience of 6 years of high school (i repeated a year) was very similar to what Gatto claims. The Classrooms held around 30-35 students at a time, all being taught the compulsory classes, these consisted of Mathematics, English, the sciences, a second language, religion and the arts. with the exception of the Arts we were all taught the same things, but it was less learning and more memorization, not much free thinking involved if any, you get questions/problems and there is an absolute answer, so we were to memorize the formula to get to this answer.
As students we were all graded and ranked based on our grades, there was always a person at the top of the class in terms of grading and someone at the bottom, those who score highly are regarded as the good students, the intelligent ones, the best, while those at the bottom are seen as slackers, dunces and unintelligent, this method in a way dictated that a certain group of people will always be successful and another is doomed to fail, further separating them in the future into different social classes, this all based off a common grading scheme across multiple subjects, when in reality good grades do not make you smart, everyone is smart in their own right, everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Someone who isn't "school smart" can still be a genius in his/her own right. This system also uses the "integrating function" forcing children to think alike, and ultimately be predictable. An example of this is group work/assignments where students are supposed to work together to solve the problems given, what usually occurs is the person who is most extroverted with the strongest views takes charge and everyone is forced to conform and go along with his/her's opinions/orders, opposed to when someone works on their own, especially someone who is introverted, they are more likely to be able to think freely, to be unpredictable to a certain degree. Free thinking results in progression, while conformity leads to a stagnant society.
This method is practically, in my opinion, used so that after the separation into different classes, the upper and the lower, the upper class has more control over the now con-formative lower class and is free to do as they please with little to no contest or resistance.
I found it interesting how deep you went into the subject of separating students based on grades, i to agree that it is wrong and unfair to do so.
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