Home / Authors / John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto Quotes

Author

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.

Filter quotes by topic

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

“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

“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

“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.”

“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.”

Ifs Thinking Children Age Realizing Crazy Behavior Constant Addiction Dependent Privacy Bells Segregation Sequence Surveillance Schooling Curriculum Confinement

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

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

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

Turns Free Will Schooling

Author:John Taylor Gatto

“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.”

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

“Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.”

Self School Enjoy Growth Creating Direct Structure Privacy Mastery Reflecting Schooling Schooled Pretext Schools And Education

Author:John Taylor Gatto

“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.”

Trying School Culture Style Personality Fit Mass Ugly Boots Compulsion Premises Schooling

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.”

“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.”

Children Persons Has Beens Grows Land Responsible Permanent Architect Sane Shelter Schooling

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

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

“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.”

Home Government Parent Teaching Childhood Adventure Radical Disrespect Schooling Best Times Schools And Education Government Education Monopolizing

Author:John Taylor Gatto

“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.”

“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.”

“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