“Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths… — 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
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
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 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
Its absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the… — 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
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
