The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
I dont think well get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if were going to change… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
• As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux.… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
If you live in a material universe where acquiring things is very important to you, then family is an absolute deterrent to maintaining that… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time,… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
“Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn’t an… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra! — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
A lot of the strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own minds. I'm not saying that there aren't armies… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
“Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
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… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share
