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Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
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
Measure
Teacher
Education
Measurement
School
Manager
Anything
Grades
Relevant
Managers
Obedience
More quotes by John Taylor Gatto
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
School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.
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
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
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
John Taylor Gatto
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
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
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
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
...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
John Taylor Gatto
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
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
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
John Taylor Gatto
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
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
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
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
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
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
John Taylor Gatto
