John Taylor Gatto Quotes

The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex.

Teachers have such hard jobs and they don't get paid well. And in order to be a teacher you need a lot of education, so people aren't teachers for any other reason than they want to be, and they want to help educate the next generation of people.

We need to identify the least effective or ineffective teachers and for those people we need to either quickly accelerate their practice or move them out of the profession. That's what I believe and quite frankly I have never met anybody at least to my face who said they disagree with that notion.

Here's a bumper sticker I'd like to see... 'We are the Proud Parents of a Child who has resisted his teacher's attempts to bend him to the will of his corporate masters'.

The teachers in America need to be applauded every day because they save the lives of kids!

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.

While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it. This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I'm in class, so teach me.

The last thing we need to do, relating to teachers, is the key to a good education in this country is a strong teacher. I would have a minimum wage for all our teachers, $40,000 per year.

When was the last time you used the words 'teach me'? Maybe not since you started first grade? Here's an irony about school: The daily grind of tests, homework, and pressures sometimes blunts rather than stimulates a thirst for knowledge.

It was a competitive examination [in Boston Latin School]. Poor kids, Brahmans, middle-class kids. The masters, as the teachers were called, didn't give a damn about - how we felt, what was - things like at home. I mean, this goes against the current grain. All they thought about was: 'You're here. You made the exam. You can do the work. And if you can't, we'll throw you out.'

Both teachers and students must move ahead together for the nation to progress.

Both of my parents are teachers. One is in the Waldorf school system in Louisville, Ky., and the other runs a music school. I grew up with loving, supportive, encouraging parents that let me make my own world, and I wish that for every single child.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

Anybody who knows the public school teacher world knows there's not a lot of money in teaching. You do it because you love what you do.

... anybody with the brains and energy to become a teacher ought to want to become something better.

Governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students. And if you remove their discretion, it stops working.

The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.

Become a teacher. Your country needs you.

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.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

The most important thing about a child's education is to have a great teacher in front of the classroom and a lot of choice and accountability with parents.