John Taylor Gatto Quotes

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

School doesn't teach you much. School teaches you how to follow directions, that's what school is for.

Schools teach the need to be taught.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.

Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.

If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society.

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.

We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.

I don't like that sort of school... where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged... where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.