Quotes by "John Taylor Gatto"

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

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.

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.

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

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

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.

For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.