John Taylor Gatto

If you live in a material universe where acquiring things is very important to you, then family is an absolute deterrent to…

— John Taylor Gatto

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible…

— 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 truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because…

— John Taylor Gatto

“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

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

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!

— 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

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

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing…

— 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

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

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

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to…

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at…

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

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