John Taylor Gatto Quotes

Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher that I was for decades, and that I still am in a certain way, wondered what was meant by the word education. I was truly dumbfounded at the very thought of dealing with such an essential and extensive subject.

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.

The only purpose of education is freedom; the only method is experience.

Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.

Every person of learning is finally his own teacher.

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

Schools teach ignorance.

In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.

Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature.

Education is very important to me, as is helping children.

To teach is to learn twice.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

I teach.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

Something I've really enjoyed learning more about is course design.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

It's not the teaching, it's the learning.

The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.

A child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise, or when they are sitting in the shadow of something else.