John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto Passes Away But His Spirit and Work Live On johntaylorgatto.com/all/john-taylo…

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...belongs to everyone.

This made me tear up. It’s so true. I remember loving school. Vying against the class for A’s and “very good” by the teacher. Meaningless. It taught me to kowtow to the “boss” like a good automaton. Homeschool is miles better! Learn, be curious, live in your community.

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 & other worthless prizes.

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.

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

It is absurd and anti-life to be 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.

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.

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.

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 Gato was such an inspiration to me when I homeschooled my children. Highly recommend you read anything he wrote about American education and adjust accordingly.

God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription... but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.

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

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.

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

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.

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.