In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.

— John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto Quotes

In the most literal sense they are impossible to reform because they have ceased to be human, having been transformed into abstract structures of superb efficiency, independent of lasting human control survival mechanisms. This is not a devil you can wrestle with as Daniel Webster did with Old Scratch, but one that has to be starved to death by depriving it of victims.

— John Taylor Gatto

Free men and women are often very eccentric.

— John Taylor Gatto

I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned.

— John Taylor Gatto

Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive.

— John Taylor Gatto

The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new.

— John Taylor Gatto

People individually do best for everyone when they do best for themselves, when they aren’t commanded too much or protected against the consequences of their own folly.

— John Taylor Gatto

School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.

— John Taylor Gatto

Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want.

— John Taylor Gatto

The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and specific places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general.

— John Taylor Gatto

Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn’t an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

— John Taylor Gatto

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

— John Taylor Gatto

Institutional goals, however sane and well-intentioned, are unable to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals.

— John Taylor Gatto

No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods.

— John Taylor Gatto

By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king.

— John Taylor Gatto

What they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as we get older.

— John Taylor Gatto

People have to be allowed to make their own mistakes and to try again, or they will never master themselves, although they may well seem to be competent when they have in fact only memorized or imitated someone else’s performance.

— John Taylor Gatto

The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to learn to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others.

— John Taylor Gatto

The most important things worth knowing are innate in you already.

— John Taylor Gatto

We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do.

— John Taylor Gatto

The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

— John Taylor Gatto
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