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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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John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
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More quotes by 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
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
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
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
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
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
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
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
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
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
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
Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
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
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
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
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
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
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
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
John Taylor Gatto