John Taylor Gatto

Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

— John Taylor Gatto

...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.

— John Taylor Gatto

Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.

— John Taylor Gatto

Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

— 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

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be…

— 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

Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to…

— 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

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

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.

— 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

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

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

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

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

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've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a…

— 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

A lot of the strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own minds. I'm not saying that there…

— 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

“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn’t want to…

— 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

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

“provides American business with the only reliable domestic market in the world. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and…

— John Taylor Gatto

Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom…

— John Taylor Gatto

If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just…

— 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

Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— 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

Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.

— John Taylor Gatto

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

— John Taylor Gatto