163 Quotes by John Taylor Gatto

How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.

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.

Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception.

It’s been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.

What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

In the most literal sense they are impossible to reform because they have ceased to be human, having been transformed into abstract structures of superb efficiency, independent of lasting human control survival mechanisms. This is not a devil you can wrestle with as Daniel Webster did with Old Scratch, but one that has to be starved to death by depriving it of victims.

No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king.