Outcasts in Frankenstein
In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell claims that schools, or
the American school system, does not make students work as hard or as long as they should.
Gladwell’s position would include ridding schools of their summer break, increasing the daily
length of school, and enforce more difficult curriculums for students. While the reforms
Gladwell proposed would get rid of the personal development that comes with summer,
ultimately, it would be feasible to implement, and improve the education of students.
Gladwell’s proposed reforms may be too extreme, and take away students’ period of
personal growth, summer break. Even Gladwell himself admits that there are studies that oppose
his view of longer days, or the cut of summer break. Studies like “Edward Jarvis on the ‘relation
of Education to Insanity’” show that “over–study” is responsible for a sizable portion of mental
