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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher? — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so;… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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 is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.” — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“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 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
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 Copy Share Image
By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive:… — 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
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
Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding… — 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
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 Copy Share Image
Individuality, family, and community are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of "one-right-way" thinking on the grand scale. Children and families… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
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 Image
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 Image
There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. — 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 thousands of… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“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 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… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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 Image
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra! — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
