163 Quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Was it possible I did like kids, just not the script written for them?

Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive.

I can’t believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children.

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness.

The extreme wealth of American big business is the direct result of school having trained us in certain attitudes like a craving for novelty. That’s what the bells are for. They don’t ring so much as to say ,"Now for something different".

Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management.

When we want better families, better neighbors, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far from the reach of systems.

Addicting people to praise as a motivator puts them on a slippery slope toward a lifetime of fear and exploitation, always looking for some expert to approve of them.

School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.