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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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John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
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Teacher
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Mon City
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Compulsory
Besides
Communism
Meat
Graded
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Rabble
Wonder
Degraded
School
Classified
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Voluntarily
More quotes by John Taylor Gatto
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
John Taylor Gatto
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
John Taylor Gatto
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
John Taylor Gatto
The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.
John Taylor Gatto
Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
John Taylor Gatto
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
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
John Taylor Gatto
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
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
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
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
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
