John Taylor Gatto Quotes
John Taylor Gatto quotes are very thought provoking. These are our favorite John Taylor Gatto quotes. Gatto is a deep thinker and outspoken author on the danger of American schooling. Born and raised in the small mining town of Monongahela, PA, Gatto was brought up in the public schooling system of the time. It wasn't until he became a grade school teacher in New York City that he sensed something was very wrong with our public education system.
Gatto believes that American schooling is a system with societal goals very different from the goal of "educating our children." Rather, the American system (and schooling in much of the world), has been designed to mostly remove the ability of Americans to "think for themselves." What better way to ensure that Americans remain dependent consumers and paper pushers.
John Taylor Gatto books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001)
Make sure to also check out the very worthwhile DVD series featuring John Taylor Gatto: The Ultimate History Lesson
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“In centuries past, the time of a child or adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventure, and the real search for mentors who might teach what he or she really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.” ~ John Gatto |
"School is a habit-training mechanism." ~ John Taylor Gatto |
"By the time kids are released from the schooling system, they are so bent to habit patterns and attitudes, that very few of them deviate from them for the rest of their lives. I think, as a schoolteacher teaching in a classroom for 30 years, that that is a horrible thing." ~ John Taylor Gatto |
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"By the time a child returns to the family from years of compulsory schooling, very few want to. Their parents are a form of some friendly stranger to them. In the key years of growing up, strangers have raised the child." ~John Taylor Gatto |
"Schools produce a negative attitude that is absolutely essential for a capitalist society to flourish. And that is an attitude of low-level dissatisfaction so that nothing you acquire satisfies for very long. " ~ John Taylor Gatto |
"Schools stabilize the world as we are familiar with it rather than drawing out the best in everybody." ~John Taylor Gatto |
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"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid away at his or her most formative years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise that the state, through its agents, knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you do." ~ John Taylor Gatto |
"As schoolteachers, we alienate a great number of school children from themselves, and we absolutely guarantee that whatever their inate genius and talents are, they are very unlikely to be developed sufficiently." ~ John Taylor Gatto |
