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.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.
It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber.
Our global future depends on the willingness of every nation to invest in its people, especially women and children.
The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view
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.
I will cause a boy who drives a plow to know more of the scriptures than the pope.
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