Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
Interpretation
The quote questions the complacency of parents in entrusting their children's education to public institutions.
John Taylor Gatto's quote critiques the passive acceptance by parents of the educational system represented by schoolteachers, suggesting that this surrender reflects a deeper societal issue regarding authority, autonomy, and the role of education in shaping young minds. It encourages parents to be more active and critical participants in their children's education rather than yielding unquestioningly to institutional authority.
In practice
In a parent-teacher meeting, this quote could encourage parents to engage more deeply in their child's educational choices.
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.
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 believe in teaching just a few students, as teaching requires a constant alert observation on each individual in order to establish a direct relationship. A good teacher cannot be fixed in a routine, and many are just that. During teaching, each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing and constantly adapting.
With no education, you have neocolonialism instead of colonialism, like you've got in Africa now and like you've got in Haiti. So what we're talking about is there has to be an educational program. That's very important.
We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.
Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
Life is a classroom -- only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.
Scoutcraft is a means through which the veriest hooligan can be brought to higher thought and to the elements of faith in God; and, coupled with the Scout's obligation to do a good turn every day, it gives the base of Duty to God and to Neighbour on which the parent or pastor can build with greater ease the form of belief that is desired.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.