It is absurd and anti-life to be a 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
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John Taylor Gatto Quotes

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

Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.

— John Taylor Gatto

Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

— John Taylor Gatto

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

Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.

— John Taylor Gatto

Shouldn’t we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the “most” of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?

— John Taylor Gatto

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it’s an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

— John Taylor Gatto

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
Reading

Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.

— John Taylor Gatto

If you live in a material universe where acquiring things is very important to you, then family is an absolute deterrent to maintaining that sort of a world, because family involves values like affection, and sympathy, and passion, and types of pleasure that lead nowhere in a material sense.

— John Taylor Gatto

The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

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

— John Taylor Gatto

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence.

— John Taylor Gatto

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.

— John Taylor Gatto

Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

— John Taylor Gatto

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

— John Taylor Gatto

I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in. I just can’t do it anymore.

— John Taylor Gatto
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