Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.
Interpretation
The quote critiques how schools negatively impact family dynamics by consuming time that families need to bond and thrive.
John Taylor Gatto's quote highlights the detrimental effect that educational institutions can have on family originality and development. By monopolizing significant time that families could otherwise spend nurturing their relationships and fostering creativity, schools risk creating dysfunctional family structures and subsequently criticize families for not functioning properly. This suggests a need for a reevaluation of educational practices that prioritize academic achievement over the holistic development of family units.
In practice
In a speech about educational reform, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of family time.
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.
Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.
To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
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