Top 90 John Taylor Gatto Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.”

— John Taylor Gatto

2. “You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s script.”

— John Taylor Gatto

3. “Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.”

— John Taylor Gatto

4. “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

6. “Grades don’t measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.”

— John Taylor Gatto

7. “Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”

— John Taylor Gatto

8. “There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.”

— John Taylor Gatto

9. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

10. “Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don’t read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.”

— John Taylor Gatto

11. “You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.”

— John Taylor Gatto

12. “You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!”

— John Taylor Gatto

13. “It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.”

— John Taylor Gatto

Featured in: Reading Quotes

14. “Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.”

— John Taylor Gatto

15. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

16. “Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.”

— John Taylor Gatto

Featured in: Reading Quotes

17. “Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.”

— John Taylor Gatto

18. “I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in. I just can’t do it anymore.”

— John Taylor Gatto

19. “School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.”

— John Taylor Gatto

20. “Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.”

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

22. “Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.”

— John Taylor Gatto

23. “Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.”

— John Taylor Gatto

24. “The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.”

— John Taylor Gatto

25. “The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.”

— John Taylor Gatto

26. “School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.”

— John Taylor Gatto

27. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

28. “I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.”

— John Taylor Gatto

29. “Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?”

— John Taylor Gatto

30. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

31. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

32. “School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.”

— John Taylor Gatto

33. “One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.”

— John Taylor Gatto

34. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

35. “People are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others.”

— John Taylor Gatto

36. “Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence.”

— John Taylor Gatto

37. “The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.”

— John Taylor Gatto

38. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

39. “Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.”

— John Taylor Gatto

40. “Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years?”

— John Taylor Gatto

41. “At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among so many different warring interests that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook.”

— John Taylor Gatto

42. “We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen – certification probably guarantees it won’t.”

— John Taylor Gatto

43. “Is it any wonder that Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of pre-empting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone.”

— John Taylor Gatto

44. “Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.”

— John Taylor Gatto

45. “Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.”

— John Taylor Gatto

46. “This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

48. “Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can’t be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.”

— John Taylor Gatto

49. “Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop – then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.”

— John Taylor Gatto

50. “It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.”

— John Taylor Gatto