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.
Performers should really go to the best schools, like Lady Gaga, you know, she went to NYU and had great teachers... It's best to really study your technique as much as you possibly can so you can have a long career instead of a quick one that's a failure.
The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.
By including children with different learning abilities in mainstream and specialized schools, we can change attitudes and promote respect. By creating suitable jobs for adults with autism, we integrate them into society.
Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.
Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
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