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...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
John Taylor Gatto
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John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
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Mon City
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Humans
More quotes by John Taylor Gatto
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
John Taylor Gatto
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
John Taylor Gatto
Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
John Taylor Gatto
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
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
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
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
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
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
John Taylor Gatto
Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
John Taylor Gatto
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It is absurd and anti-life to be 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
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
John Taylor Gatto
