John Taylor Gatto Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Mother, School, Boys

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  19 Copy quote

• You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!

  John Taylor Gatto

  Adventure, Needs, Exploration

  56 Copy quote

• Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Threat, Humans, Human Beings

  12 Copy quote

• Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  38 Copy quote

• Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Self, Self Knowledge, Bases

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.34, New Society Publishers

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Teaching, Learning, People

  42 Copy quote

• What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Growing Up, Engineering, United States

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

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  41 Copy quote

• Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Notebook, Teacher, Moving

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

  61 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Thinking, People, Generations

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

  8 Copy quote

• God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Spiritual, Political

  9 Copy quote

• When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Free Will, Turns, Schooling

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  17 Copy quote

• Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Inspiring, Giving, Want

  7 Copy quote

• People are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Dream, People, Community

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.59, New Society Publishers

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

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