John Taylor Gatto Quotes About Learning

Quotes about: Learning

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Learning, Men, Thinking

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Learning, Creative, Conditioning

• 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

• Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Inspirational, Educational, Learning

  John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.18, New Society Publishers

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