John Taylor Gatto
Educator
1935-12-15
Quotes by John Taylor Gatto
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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.
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People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.
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Individuality, family, and community are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of one-right-way thinking on the grand scale. Children and families need some relief from government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions belonging to THEM are to develop. Without these freedom has no meaning.
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Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the most of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?
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I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.
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Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
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Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
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Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
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It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.
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I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.
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When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
Read quote -
It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.
Read quote -
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
Read quote -
Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the most of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?
Read quote -
I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.
Read quote -
People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.
Read quote -
I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.
Read quote -
Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Read quote -
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
Read quote -
Individuality, family, and community are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of one-right-way thinking on the grand scale. Children and families need some relief from government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions belonging to THEM are to develop. Without these freedom has no meaning.
Read quote