Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
John Taylor Gatto
Top 10 Best Quotes
“You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s script.”
“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”
“No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods.”
“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.”
“Institutional goals, however sane and well-intentioned, are unable to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals.”
“By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king.”
“The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.”
“The capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and specific places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general.”
“People have to be allowed to make their own mistakes and to try again, or they will never master themselves, although they may well seem to be competent when they have in fact only memorized or imitated someone else’s performance.”
“Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables—and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways—network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism.”
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