Skip to content

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up.

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

Another quote →

Topics

Education

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)

All John Taylor Gatto quotes →

You may also like

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

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.