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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it. — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
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
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 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
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“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 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
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
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
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 Copy Share 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 Copy Share Image
“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns… — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
“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 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
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 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 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
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
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
