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.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes a rigid education system that forces students to follow a one-size-fits-all approach, ignoring their individual interests and passions.
John Taylor Gatto's quote highlights the absurdity of an educational system that restricts students' learning experiences by enforcing a narrow curriculum. It underscores the idea that education should be tailored to individual interests, allowing students the freedom to explore their passions—whether that be architecture or poetry—rather than forcing them into predetermined roles that do not align with their personal aspirations.
In practice
In a discussion about educational reforms, one might use this quote to argue for more personalized learning approaches.
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 and other worthless prizes.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.
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.
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people... It is primarily through observing, playing, and working with others older and younger than himself that a child discovers both what he can do and who he can become — that he develops both his ability and his identity.
Most people who decide to grow personally find their first mentors in the pages of books.
How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
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