John Taylor Gatto Quotes

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

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

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.

The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.

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.

When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.

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

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

You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.

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

Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

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.

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

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

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

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.

Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.

The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.

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

Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence

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

Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the "most" of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

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

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.

People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.

It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.