Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
Author
Essayist
Teacher
Writer
Mon City
Kids
Behinds
Math
Time
School
Behind
Schools
Wells
Teacher
Contact
Well
Taught
Basic
Smokescreen
Self
Takes
Six
Transmit
Teach
Cry
Literacy
Enough
Practice
Lessons
Twelve
Children
Hours
Skills
Teachers
Years

More quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
John Taylor Gatto
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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