John Taylor Gatto Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  93 Copy quote

• Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Learning, Unique, Challenges

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

  98 Copy quote

• 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

  52 Copy quote

• You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Life, Writing, Learning

  John Taylor Gatto (2017). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.9, New Society Publishers

  89 Copy quote

• 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.

  78 Copy quote

• Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Teaching, Home, Adventure

  "I Quit, I Think," The Wall Street Journal, en.wikiquote.org. July 25, 1991.

  63 Copy quote

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

  John Taylor Gatto

  Inspiring, Giving, Want

  10 Copy quote

• The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Real, Responsibility, Goal

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

  67 Copy quote

• If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisond by their own self policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Giving Up, Self, Expectations

  55 Copy quote

• 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”

  64 Copy quote

• 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

  69 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

  10 Copy quote

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

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Teacher, School

  103 Copy quote

• There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Way, Fingerprints, Educated

  92 Copy quote

• 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

  86 Copy quote

• 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

  81 Copy quote

• 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

  55 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  46 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

  15 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

  20 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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  30 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

• 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.

  86 Copy quote

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