Top 64 John Taylor Gatto Quotes
#1. 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
#2. A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people
and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.
John Taylor Gatto
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen
John Taylor Gatto
#7. Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
John Taylor Gatto
#8. I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.
John Taylor Gatto
#9. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
John Taylor Gatto
#10. 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
#11. It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.
John Taylor Gatto
#12. People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.
John Taylor Gatto
#13. Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.
John Taylor Gatto
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
John Taylor Gatto
#17. 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
#18. Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
John Taylor Gatto
#19. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
John Taylor Gatto
#20. It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.
John Taylor Gatto
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that
nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if
nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting
either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
John Taylor Gatto
#24. How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.
John Taylor Gatto
#25. There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.
John Taylor Gatto
#26. Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years?
John Taylor Gatto
#27. 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
#28. Is it any wonder that Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of pre-empting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone.
John Taylor Gatto
#29. 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
#30. Average men and women don't really exist except as a statistical conceit.
John Taylor Gatto
#31. 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
#32. When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
John Taylor Gatto
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
John Taylor Gatto
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts experience first.
John Taylor Gatto
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
John Taylor Gatto
#48. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
John Taylor Gatto
#49. 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
#50. Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
John Taylor Gatto
#51. Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.
John Taylor Gatto
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
John Taylor Gatto
#59. School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged.
John Taylor Gatto
#60. 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
#61. 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.
John Taylor Gatto
#62. 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
#63. Schools [are] ... institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
John Taylor Gatto
#64. 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
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