John Taylor Gatto Quotes

Its amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.

I don't think children themselves have changed that much. It's the world that has changed.

When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.

When I was a boy, there were three influences on children. The school, the family, and the church. Now there is a fourth---television.

It takes a village to raise a child.

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

As a kid, you're so at the mercy of the people around you, the people raising you, your environment.

Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

Our basic fundamental desires are overly stimulated. A friend of mine said, "you have a generation of people that have been accidentally marketed to."

I was homeschooled growing up, and we fantasized about high school, about what that experience was going to be like.

Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.

Any place where you have to deal with many social actors like a school - you have the parents, the Ministry of Education, the school board, and the teachers - you need all kinds of sets and rules. You're trying to foresee anything that can happen and everything becomes really rigid. They don't want to talk about death because they don't want to overwhelm the children, but that has already happened, so you're not going to overwhelm them more.

Free education for all children in public schools... Combination of education with industrial production

For decades, the public school system failed too many children, so we passed the No Child Left Behind Act and demanded schools show results in return for money.

School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.

Baby, high school's over. High school's never over.

We don't go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy.

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School.

School, in general, was not great. Children are just mean to each other... but by high school, I probably stopped being annoying to people, and people stopped being mean. By the end of it, it was wonderful.