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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
...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
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
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
Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
John Taylor Gatto
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
John Taylor Gatto
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
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
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
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
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
John Taylor Gatto
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
John Taylor Gatto
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
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
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
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
John Taylor Gatto
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
John Taylor Gatto
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
John Taylor Gatto
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of it isn't real.
John Taylor Gatto
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
John Taylor Gatto
