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.
The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.
It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.
How often we all have heard speakers begin by calling the attention of the audience to their lack of preparation or lack of ability. If you are not prepared, the audience will probably discover it without your assistance.
I think you should read everything you can. In my case, by the age of 10, I'd read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice. _x000D_ You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.
I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.
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