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John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto Quotes

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John Taylor Gatto is an American author known for his critical analysis of the educational system. Born on December 15, 1935, he is a former public school teacher who gained national attention for refusing to comply with bureaucratic regulations in education. Gatto's work emphasizes the importance of educational freedom and personal responsibility.

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Famous John Taylor Gatto Quotes

“I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood.”

School Education Learning Discourse Critique

Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth.”

School Education Society Critique Homeschooling Discrouse

Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“When fundamental rights depend on someone's whim, you really have no rights, only privileges that may be withdrawn at any minute.”

School Education Rights Privileges

Book:A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling

Source: A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling

“School is a perfect place to turn science into religion, but it's the wrong place to learn science, for sure.”

School Science Religion Education

Book:A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling

Source: A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling

“Schools create the problems they seem to exist to solve.”

School Education

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want.”

Waiting Education Speaking Up

Author:John Taylor Gatto

“Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education.”

Community Education Family Society Discourse Critique Schools Networks

Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness.”

Children Education Teaching Schooling Dumbness

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive.”

Children Education Boredom Coward Classroom Schooling Fish Bowl Purpose For Being Alive

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management.”

Children Education Schooling Close Management

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Was it possible I did like kids, just not the script written for them?”

Children Education Forced Schooling

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“I can’t believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children.”

Children Education Schooling Indoctrination Centralised Schooling

Book:The Underground History of American Education, Volume I: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education, Volume I: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Is it possible that those who sit atop the social bell curve represent the worst of evolution’s products, not its best? Have the fools among us who just don’t get it risen up and taken command?”

Education Society Psychopath Ellite

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, 'What is education for?' If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that's really not your business, and it shouldn't be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.”

Education Democracy Educational Philosophy Homeschooling Public Schools

Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“What they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as we get older.”

Reality Education Getting Old Rule Book

Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

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

School Education Teacher Managers Obedience Grades Relevant Measurement Teaching Children Good Grades Bad Grades

Author:John Taylor Gatto

“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.”

“Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.”

“God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.”

States Able Spiritual Political Education Half Economy Century Dangerous Tradition Ears Western Corporate Competitors Wwii Schooling

Author:John Taylor Gatto

“Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.”

“Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”

Men Humans School Human Beings Education Teacher Produce College Behavior Mass Management Instruments University Population Controlled Chicago Application Columbia Harper Sears

Author:John Taylor Gatto