John Taylor Gatto Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  10 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

  10 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

  7 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

  22 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

  36 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

  13 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

  18 Copy quote

• Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Teaching, Function, Profession

  15 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

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  63 Copy quote

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

  John Taylor Gatto

  Free Will, Turns, Schooling

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  17 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

  63 Copy quote

• Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Unique, Individual, Should

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

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  25 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

  39 Copy quote

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

  John Taylor Gatto

  Adventure, Needs, Exploration

  57 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

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  19 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

  43 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

  31 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

  43 Copy quote

• 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”

  14 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

  13 Copy quote

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