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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

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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
Children
Teach
Trying
Wrong
Tries
Good
Evil
Distinction
Things
Family
Schools
School
Destroy
Firsts
Difference
First
Learning
Right
Differences

More quotes by 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.
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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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
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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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Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
John Taylor Gatto
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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.
John Taylor Gatto
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Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
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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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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Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
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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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
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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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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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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
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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
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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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Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
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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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