John Taylor Gatto Quotes

You see, we'll never be able to compete in the 21st century unless we have an education system that doesn't quit on children, an education system that raises standards, an education that makes sure there's excellence in every classroom.

If you want some additional money for your school, we'll give it to you. But you've got to compete, show us that you're going to reform your education system so that our children are performing better.

When you put more than a million kids in school, you take a plane today and go to Haiti, you cannot see the results. You will see the results in 30 years when you see a different type of Haitian.

May this plain statement of facts prevail on the friends of the rising generation to interpose for their welfare; that the education of children may no longer be to parent and master a lottery, in which the prizes bear no proportion to the enormous number of blanks.

What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?

If we are going to compete in this world we're in today, there is no possible way we can do it with lowering expectations and dumbing down everything. Children are going to suffer, and families' hearts are going to be broken that their kids won't be able to get a job in the 21st Century.

I majored in elementary education, and I have a passion for kids.

Centuries have elapsed since schools were first established.... Because learning was viewed as the exclusive province of the samurai and his superiors, farmers, artisans, merchants and women have neglected it altogether.... There shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person .... Hereafter ... every man shall, of his own accord, subordinate all other matters to the education of his children.

Competition has not worked in education because it has never really been tried.

The most important domestic issue we face is education…and education is so broken.

Children, although for the most part under the unwritten discipline of home, are not to be regarded as outside the control of public regulation. For the education of children is a matter of more than private interest; it concerns the State, which indeed regards the right training of the young as, in certain aspects, within its proper sphere. I would wish to see this responsibility extended.

If I could help educate our children at an institution for higher learning, that would be a noble thing.

I wouldn't be educating children if I did not believe in human potential.

There is no other complex field in our society in which do-it-yourself beats out factory production or market production. Nobody makes his or her own car. But it is still the case that parents can perform the job of educating their children [homeschooling], in many cases better than our present education system.

We must fix our broken education system. Every parent deserves a choice as to how to best educate their children so that every child has a chance to fulfill their potential.

I do look upon the secretary of education's primary responsibility as the quality of education that - and improving the education that every child in American public schools receives.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

School choice is one of the strongest ways we have to educate our children, .. believes in school choice and he is going to work hard to enact school choice.

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

There’s a belief now that the problem with our schools is parents, that if we just had better parents we would have better performing kids and, therefore, we wouldn’t have a problem at all. But what’s missing in that equation is that you do have a lot of parents in this country who are very involved in their children’s education and who do want something better. They want to see better for their kids. They know that they’re in schools that aren’t performing particularly well and if you look at how we treat those parents, it is quite poorly.

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages.

If we want to invest in the prosperity of our nation, we must invest in the education of our children so that their talents may be fully employed.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of government and education.