John Taylor Gatto quotes

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. (John Taylor Gatto)
In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script. View quote
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 to take responsibility for their lives. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra! View quote
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 it. I should know. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. View quote
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 on faith. (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 in your place in the pyramid. View quote
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 a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction. View quote
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 from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly. (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 we have been rendered permanent children. It's the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that. View quote
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 in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist. View quote
John Taylor Gatto