“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“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.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“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.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
“It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.”
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
"You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script."
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
"Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager."
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
"Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system."
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders."
—John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)