There comes a time when you found yourself chained and held down, although these chains aren't physical but the pain is real. These were the darkest day of Life, helplesness state only makes one weak. But there are people who think Otherwise and help other to free from shackles. John Taylor Gatto is one of those individual.
John Taylor Gatto inspired thousands to challenge the premise on which our education system was built. He understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills & talents. He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow.
Gatto dedicated his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system. He wrote several books on his experience in the classroom including Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. His book The Underground History of American Education is perhaps the most accurate and damning history of the American education system that has ever been written.
Here Some of words from his Books:
“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.”
“Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”
“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.”
“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
“Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.”
“People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.”
“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.”
''Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.”
