John Taylor Gatto Quotes

I think the depth, what children can handle and what they're interested in, is much deeper than I think what people assume. I think it's why sometimes we make things too simple for them.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

Look I'm politically correct, I went to a great school, I was a good student, look, I'm a smart guy.

I got good grades in school, but I'm not sure if I'm smart or if it just means I can study. I've never taken one of those IQ tests, and I don't want to. It's so pointless. As long as you enjoy life and have fun and you're healthy and happy, that's what matters.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.

I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.

When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

There are three kinds of brains: One understands of itself, another can be taught to understand, and the third can neither understand to itself or be taught to understand.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.

Teachers ... preach "the superiority of the intelligence"; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required for our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the practical.

We measure minds by their stature; it would be better to esteem them by their beauty.

Learning improves in school environments where there are comprehensive music and arts programs. They increase the ability of young people to do math. They increase the ability of young people to read. And most important of all, they're a lot of fun.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.