Quotes from John Taylor Gatto

As escolas ensinam exatamente o que se pretende que ensinem, e fazem isso muito bem: como ser um bom egípcio e permanecer no seu lugar da pirâmide.

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.

Em nossa sociedade secular, a escola se tornou o substituto da Igreja e, assim como na Igreja, é necessário que seus ensinamentos sejam aceitos com base na fé.

A escola é uma sentença de prisão de doze anos em que maus hábitos são o único currículo verdadeiramente aprendido.

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.

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.

Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management.

nothing important can ever really be boring.

Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others.

Under this outlook, the classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others.

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".

Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life

School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life—in fact, it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts—and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right.

Look again at the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses

Is it possible that those who sit atop the social bell curve represent the worst of evolution's products, not its best? Have the fools among us who just don't get it risen up and taken command?

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

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.

Poverty can't make you miserable; only a bad character and a weak spirit can do that.

When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.

Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.