Whose to Blame for Lack of Free Time?

Amy Sorensen
Pointing the Finger:
Whose to Blame for Lack of Free Time?
In society today there has come to be a struggle over who is responsible for raising the American youth. While more households have two income families and single mothers are becoming more prevalent, children are suddenly in a new dilemma that Americans of the 60’s and earlier never had to deal with. According to people such as three-time Teacher of the Year award winner John Taylor Gatto, television and school are now controlling the American child’s life. The kids are no longer able to grow and learn about the world around them because they spend to much time watching the family television, at school, doing homework, or at school-related activities. This theory proposes that the combination of television and school is now replacing the time that a child would usually use to learn about the grown-up world and learn the “tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman” (Gatto), however he forgets a third variable, which is the parent.
In a portion of his speech “Why Schools Don’t Educate”, John Taylor Gatto focuses on the effect that television and school has on a child’s upbringing. As we come into the digital age Gatto points out how life used to be and how kids spent their days learning about the world through interaction with adults and also how free time helps children find their own individuality. By breaking down a week in one of his student’s life, he shows that kids spend a majority of time watching television, being at school or doing school related activities such as homework. He goes on to say that by taking away a child’s free time we are inevitably making them “unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence” (Gatto). John Gatto continues by listing things he sees in his classroom that he feels are directly related to a lack of free time. He says that he sees children “indifferent to the adult world… almost no curiosity… they cannot concentrate for very long… poor sense of the future… they have no sense of how the past has predestined their own present… cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness… uneasy with intimacy… are materialistic… the children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges” (Gatto). John Taylor Gatto finds that television and schools have caused all of the conditions listed above.
When giving the initial speech, John Gatto had just accepted an award and was more than likely in front of an audience of intellectuals who knew of him and had come specifically to hear him and cheer him on. In this case, his audience probably did not need to be persuaded very much into accepting his ideas; they probably were fans of Gatto and were merely excited to see him speak in person. The purpose of the speech was to convince others in the field of education that school and television have caused students to fall into a trap where they are now lacking “wisdom, fortitude, temperance and justice” (Gatto) because all of their time is being taken up. Gatto is trying to get people to understand that this lack of free time is what is destroying families today. Seeing as the text is about education and references schooling and the kids that Gatto has taught, this topic is well suited for the audience. The issue is that people who are not a part of this group of educators and fans of Gatto can see problems with some of his theories.
While Gatto makes several statements in this text, I will focus on the idea that television and school are taking up the free time of children in this electronic era. Gatto references past times when children were more active in their community and in work-related activities. Because in the change in structure of our economy and of the industrialization of our country, the government has changed work laws and it is no longer safe for kids to be working in positions they did before the world wars. Our economy has also caused more families with two parents to have both adults working. This means more child care and less parent-child interaction, but it does not mean that the parent has an excuse to not teach the child real world values. While I do believe more children are being set up in front of a television, rather than being cared for and interacted with by an adult, I do not think that television itself is to blame.
I agree with Gatto that television and school take up a lot of time in a child’s life, more than it ever has before because of extra school activities and all of the new shows, but I think there is a third variable he is forgetting. While there are more and more television shows directed to children, not all are necessarily bad and the ones that are can easily be turned off. The reason a child still watches that bad show though is because of the third variable that Gatto misses, the parent. A child does not know how to turn on the television until a parent teaches them and it is the parent’s responsibility to explain a show after the child watches it. For example, Wizards of Waverly Place is about people with magical powers. The show itself has the right vs. wrong aspect and teaches some values, but kids do not necessarily know that magical powers are not real. The parent is the one who is supposed to teach them what is real and what is not. Now that we often find two-income families, I believe that after a long day of work parents are sitting their kids in front of the television rather than teaching them morals and values themselves. Thus I find that Gatto was close, but missed the variable that leads to an increase in children watching television.
John Taylor Gatto is one of many people who are realizing that children in this day are becoming more and more rebellious and angry and are having more developmental issues. In order to point out why this is he came up with a seemingly fool-proof theory. This theory proposes that the combination of television and school now is replacing the time that a child would usually use to learn about the grown-up world and learn the “tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman” (Gatto). In my own opinion John was rather close, but forgot that the person who sets the child in front of the television should also be responsible for taking away the free time of the child. Free time is an important aspect of a child’s development; this is the time when they figure out who they are and what they want to become. By filling this free time up, we risk damaging the crucial developmental stages of a child’s growth.

Works Cited
Gatto, John Taylor. “Why Schools Don’t Educate”. Sundance Choice. None. Cengage Learning. Mason Ohio. 2008. Print.