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John Taylor Gatto

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Famous John Taylor Gatto Quotes

“When we want better families, better neighbors, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far from the reach of systems.”

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

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Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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“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.”

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Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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“School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.”

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Book:The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
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“Stanley was passed from store to store doing free labor in exchange for an opportunity to learn the business. "This way I decide which business I like well enough to set up for myself," he told me. "You tell me what books to read and I’ll read them, but I don’t have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like the rest of these people, working for somebody else." After I heard that I couldn’t in good conscience keep him locked up. Could you? If you say yes, tell me why.”

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

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Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.”

WayWellsWould BeAgeTodaySchoolMotherLeftBoysSpecialGeniusPoliticianTenScientistFortunePsychologicalEducatedImmortalityPeculiarBusinessmanFranklinThirteenAndrewCounselingTamedCarnegieBen Franklin
Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“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.”

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Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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“It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.”

YearsWellsChildrenSelfEnoughKidsSchoolHoursBehindsTeachPracticeTeacherCryTaughtLessonsSkillsSixMathContactTwelveLiteracyTransmitMath Skills
Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.”

IfsKnowsYearsKidsSchoolJobsHurtTeachTaughtTruth IsLet MeBlindFishesObedienceBoardsPublic SchoolCurriculumSchool BoardBlind Obedience
Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate”; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing.”

IfsThinkingNeedsWellsLittlesDoeSchoolRealizingTeacherImpossibleDesignIgnoranceBecomingInstitutionsFaultsLifetimeDisasterEducateInherentSchoolingLittle MoneyBad Teacher
Book:Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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“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.”

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Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“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.”

IfsNeedsWritingYearsMeanSchoolReadingForceBehindsEducationClassMillionsFiveTeacherWeekMonthsSixNineHidingRoutineTwelveJustificationSchoolingArithmeticHomeschoolingBanalityNine MonthsRationaleReading Writing
Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.”

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Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“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.”

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Author:John Taylor Gatto
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“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.”

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Author:John Taylor Gatto
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