Education Quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

— John Taylor Gatto

“It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.”

— 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

School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged.

— John Taylor Gatto

Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.

— 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

There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto

“I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and…

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto

“Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would…

— 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…

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto

“imitation of notable models as an effective spring of learning; was the most ancient and effective motivation to learn—to become like someone…

— John Taylor Gatto

The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into…

— John Taylor Gatto

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College…

— John Taylor Gatto

“The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their…

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto

I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change…

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto

“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns…

— John Taylor Gatto

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and…

— John Taylor Gatto

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon,…

— John Taylor Gatto

“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or…

— John Taylor Gatto

I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder,…

— John Taylor Gatto

“I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of…

— John Taylor Gatto

“It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of…

— john taylor gatto

Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.

— John Taylor Gatto

When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.

— John Taylor Gatto

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

— 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

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that,…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto

“When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of…

— John Taylor Gatto

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a…

— John Taylor Gatto

Ive concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we havent yet figured out how to…

— 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…

— John Taylor Gatto