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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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All School Children Education Schooling Ifs Learning Teach Way People Teacher Humans Teaching World Community Society Thinking Years Wells Critique Government

Famous John Taylor Gatto Quotes

“People individually do best for everyone when they do best for themselves, when they aren’t commanded too much or protected against the consequences of their own folly.”

People Doing The Best

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

“People can change, but systems cannot without losing their structural integrity.”

People Integrity System Changing

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

“People are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others.”

People Soul Whole Dream Humanity Individual Community Groups Harmony Slave Pursue Consistent Gathering

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

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

“Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; 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. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.”

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

People Thinking Young Economy Generations

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

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

“The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.”

People School Order Individual Teach Teacher Mystery Truth Is Logic Institutions Caring Abstract Contribution Humane Administrators

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

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

“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 Ifs Knows My Own Obligation Trusted Avoided

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

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

“It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.”

People Wells May Young Learning Imagine Teaching Taught Interfere Arithmetic

Author: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 seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.”

“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.”

“We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison.”

People Thinking World Way Has Beens Country Today School Taught Intellectual Prison Financial Plenty Dependent Educate World Today Schooling Schooled Compulsory Secondary School

Author:John Taylor Gatto