163 Quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen.

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Private time is absolutely essential if a private identity is going to develop, and private time is equally essential to the development of a code of private values, without which we aren’t really individuals at all.

It’s like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.

The “Curriculum of Family” is at the heart of any good life. We’ve gotten away from that curriculum – it’s time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.

A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people – and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.

Regimentation, methodization, systematization, standardization, organization, coordination, disciplined arrangements, conformity – these things are at the very heart of our national state policies, and are the poison that has killed our families and left individual survivors in a numbed, angry, nearly hysterical condition.

Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, ‘What is education for?’ If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that’s really not your business, and it shouldn’t be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it’s an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.