Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
Author
Essayist
Teacher
Writer
Mon City
Choices
Assumption
Examine
Spirit
Lays
Insist
Power
Stranger
Strangers
Must
Police
Urge
Mind
Using
Spirits
Choice
Sovereign
Behinds
Urges
Schooled
Behind
Submit
Assumptions

More quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Image
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
Image
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
John Taylor Gatto
Image
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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