Top 90 John Taylor Gatto Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.”

— John Taylor Gatto

52. “If you live in a material universe where acquiring things is very important to you, then family is an absolute deterrent to maintaining that sort of a world, because family involves values like affection, and sympathy, and passion, and types of pleasure that lead nowhere in a material sense.”

— John Taylor Gatto

53. “That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

— John Taylor Gatto

54. “The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.”

— John Taylor Gatto

55. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

56. “It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.”

— John Taylor Gatto

57. “Nearly a century ago a French sociologist wrote that every institution’s unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself.”

— John Taylor Gatto

58. “Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen.”

— John Taylor Gatto

59. “In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.”

— John Taylor Gatto

60. “Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.”

— John Taylor Gatto

61. “Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.”

— John Taylor Gatto

62. “The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new.”

— John Taylor Gatto

63. “The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.”

— John Taylor Gatto

64. “It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.”

— John Taylor Gatto

65. “The “Curriculum of Family” is at the heart of any good life. We’ve gotten away from that curriculum – it’s time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.”

— John Taylor Gatto

66. “The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.”

— John Taylor Gatto

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

— John Taylor Gatto

68. “What they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as we get older.”

— John Taylor Gatto

69. “In the most literal sense they are impossible to reform because they have ceased to be human, having been transformed into abstract structures of superb efficiency, independent of lasting human control survival mechanisms. This is not a devil you can wrestle with as Daniel Webster did with Old Scratch, but one that has to be starved to death by depriving it of victims.”

— John Taylor Gatto

70. “Private time is absolutely essential if a private identity is going to develop, and private time is equally essential to the development of a code of private values, without which we aren’t really individuals at all.”

— John Taylor Gatto

71. “Shouldn’t we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the “most” of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?”

— John Taylor Gatto

72. “How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.”

— John Taylor Gatto

73. “Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception.”

— John Taylor Gatto

74. “Real books, unlike schoolbooks, can’t be standardized. They are eccentric; no book fits everyone.”

— John Taylor Gatto

75. “By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king.”

— John Taylor Gatto

76. “Regimentation, methodization, systematization, standardization, organization, coordination, disciplined arrangements, conformity – these things are at the very heart of our national state policies, and are the poison that has killed our families and left individual survivors in a numbed, angry, nearly hysterical condition.”

— John Taylor Gatto

77. “People individually do best for everyone when they do best for themselves, when they aren’t commanded too much or protected against the consequences of their own folly.”

— John Taylor Gatto

78. “Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want.”

— John Taylor Gatto

79. “A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people – and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.”

— John Taylor Gatto

80. “People who read too many books get quirky. We can’t have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.”

— John Taylor Gatto

81. “What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. 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

82. “Institutional goals, however sane and well-intentioned, are unable to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals.”

— John Taylor Gatto

83. “Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, ‘What is education for?’ If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that’s really not your business, and it shouldn’t be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.”

— John Taylor Gatto

84. “People have to be allowed to make their own mistakes and to try again, or they will never master themselves, although they may well seem to be competent when they have in fact only memorized or imitated someone else’s performance.”

— John Taylor Gatto

85. “The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.”

— John Taylor Gatto

86. “No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods.”

— John Taylor Gatto

87. “Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn’t an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.”

— John Taylor Gatto

88. “Free men and women are often very eccentric.”

— John Taylor Gatto

89. “The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and specific places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general.”

— John Taylor Gatto

90. “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.”

— John Taylor Gatto

91. “I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned.”

— John Taylor Gatto

92. “We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do.”

— John Taylor Gatto

93. “The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to learn to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others.”

— John Taylor Gatto

94. “The most important things worth knowing are innate in you already.”

— John Taylor Gatto

95. “The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.”

— John Taylor Gatto