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School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

— John Taylor Gatto Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

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More quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression and intimidation.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently.

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Taylor Gatto (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.