Quote

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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John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
Author
Essayist
Teacher
Writer
Mon City
Praise
Sets
Presents
Pitting
Exercise
Prize
Associates
Competitions
Learning
Basis
Petty
Unwelcome
Force
Bases
Worthless
Prizes
Another
Forces
Prisoner
Associations
School
Potential
Association
Prisoners
Daily
Motion
Exercises
Competition
Meaningless
Contests

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Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
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Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
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You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
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Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
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In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
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Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence
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I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.
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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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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
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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
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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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It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
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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.
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...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
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Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
John Taylor Gatto