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

John Taylor Gatto

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John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
Author
Essayist
Teacher
Writer
Mon City
Schooling
Education
Turns
Free
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More quotes by John Taylor Gatto

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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
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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
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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
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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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Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
John Taylor Gatto
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You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
John Taylor Gatto
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Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
John Taylor Gatto
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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
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...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
John Taylor Gatto
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Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
John Taylor Gatto
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.
John Taylor Gatto
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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
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Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
John Taylor Gatto
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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