School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
John Taylor GattoRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the school system for fostering competition and disconnection among students rather than encouraging collaboration and meaningful connections.
John Taylor Gatto's quote highlights the detrimental aspects of the educational system, pointing out how it often creates an environment of dis-association among students. Instead of fostering community and cooperation, schools can become places where students are pitted against one another in trivial competitions, leading to feelings of isolation and stressing the pursuit of superficial accolades rather than genuine learning and relationships.
Themes
EducationCompetitionDisassociationCollaborationLearning
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about reforming the education system to prioritize collaboration.
More from John Taylor Gatto
All quotes →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.
John Taylor GattoRead
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.
John Taylor GattoRead
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.
John Taylor GattoRead
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.
John Taylor GattoRead
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.
John Taylor GattoRead
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