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21 " Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn’t an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life. "
― John Taylor Gatto , The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
22 " Poverty can’t make you miserable; only a bad character and a weak spirit can do that. "
23 " The most important things worth knowing are innate in you already. "
24 " We live together, you and I, in a dark time when all official history is propaganda. "
25 " The search for a material paradise is a flight away from humanity into the sterile nonlife of mechanisms where everything is perfect until it becomes junk. "
26 " Wage-slaves, free in name only, are much cheaper to exploit, and work harder than slaves. "
― John Taylor Gatto , Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
27 " Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want. "
― John Taylor Gatto
28 " What they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as we get older. "
29 " Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. "
30 " Massified populations cannot exercise self-control very well since they depend on constant oversight to behave as required. When external controls are removed, anything becomes possible. "
31 " We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do. "
― John Taylor Gatto , Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
32 " In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith. "
33 " When we want better families, better neighbors, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far from the reach of systems. "
34 " Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. "
35 " The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. "
36 " School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely. "
37 " At the heart of any school reforms that aren’t simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss. "
38 " The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to learn to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others. "
39 " Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die. "
40 " Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. "