John Taylor Gatto

Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged.

— John Taylor Gatto

Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.

— 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

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

Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the "most" of everything to our children in a…

— John Taylor Gatto

Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame…

— John Taylor Gatto

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that…

— John Taylor Gatto

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

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

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

“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns…

— John Taylor Gatto

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

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

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

— John Taylor Gatto

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

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and…

— John Taylor Gatto

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

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

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

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

“provides American business with the only reliable domestic market in the world. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and…

— 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

If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just…

— John Taylor Gatto

“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn’t want to…

— John Taylor Gatto

“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

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

“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

“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

Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

— John Taylor Gatto

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

— John Taylor Gatto