John Taylor Gatto Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Jobs, Children, Reading

• Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Kids, Class

  John Taylor Gatto (2017). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.53, New Society Publishers

• I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Growing Up, Real

  John Taylor Gatto (2000). “A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling”

• Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know nothing about, and having those strangers work on your child's mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years? Could there be a more radical idea than that? Back in Colonial days in America, if you proposed that kind of idea, they'd burn you at the stake, you mad person! It's a mad idea!

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Years, Ideas

• This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Land, Shelter

  John Taylor Gatto (2017). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.79, New Society Publishers

• One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Learning, School

• Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Children, Hands

• The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Silly, Learning

• By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that
  nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if
  nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting
  either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, School, Errors

• Individuality, family, and community are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of "one-right-way" thinking on the grand scale. Children and families need some relief from government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions belonging to THEM are to develop. Without these freedom has no meaning.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Thinking, Government

• A lot of the strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own minds. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants, but there isn't any way to punish a large number of deviants. It's too expensive to even try. So, the solution is to colonize the minds of children as they're growing up, so that they become their own police, and to report on others who are deviating.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Growing Up, Children, Army

• Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Crazy, Thinking

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.19, New Society Publishers

• Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Believe, Teaching

• Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Responsibility, Play

• Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the "most" of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, World, Resources

• Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Giving Up, Government

• School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Stupid, School

• Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Independence, Labels

• Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Lying, Modern Life

  John Taylor Gatto (2000). “A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling”

• It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Secret, Honor

• It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Teacher, Children, School

• • As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Children, Mean, Adults

  John Taylor Gatto (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.13, New Society Publishers

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