John Taylor Gatto Quotes About School

Quotes about: School

• 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

• It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Life, Education, Teacher

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

• Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Teacher, Reading

• The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Personality, Style

• Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Teacher, School

• You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Daughter, School, Son

• 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

• 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

• School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Learning, School, Long

• The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Order, Truth Is

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.30, New Society Publishers

• Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Teacher, School

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

• School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Years, Jail

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.29, New Society Publishers

• School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Learning, School, Exercise

• Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Meat, Wonder

• I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate”; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Teacher, School, Ignorance

  John Taylor Gatto (2017). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.28, New Society Publishers

• I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Hurt, Jobs, School

• Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Self, Creating

• I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, World, Want

• 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

• The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Real, School, Government

• For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Ambition, School, Training

• In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Teaching, Taken, School

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.28, New Society Publishers

• 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

• Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Ideas, Sound

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.51, New Society Publishers

• Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Pyramids, Egyptian

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.27, New Society Publishers

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