Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist. — 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
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher? — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach. — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged. — John Taylor Gatto Copy Share Image
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood. — 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
There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. — 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
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 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… — 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
“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 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
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
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 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
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 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
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
“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
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
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 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
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
“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
“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 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
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling. — 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
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory. — 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
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
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
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
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
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
![“Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.” quote by John Taylor Gatto](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/b0a/john-taylor-gatto-4736_childhood_schools-are-institutions-monopolizing-th_2843107.jpg)
