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John Taylor Gatto Quotes about Teaching

All John Taylor Gatto Quotes Adventure Children Community Education Giving Growing Up Learning Reading School Teaching quotes Writing
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.

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
Teaching, Home, Adventure
"I Quit, I Think," The Wall Street Journal, en.wikiquote.org. July 25, 1991.

Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.

John Taylor Gatto
Children, Believe, Teaching

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

John Taylor Gatto
Teaching, Function, Profession

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
Teaching, Learning, People

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
Teaching, Community, Healthy
John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.28, New Society Publishers

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

John Taylor Gatto
Believe, Teaching, School
"Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

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
Teaching, Taken, School
John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore (2013). “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”, p.28, New Society Publishers

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