The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.
Interpretation
The traditional education system, which emphasizes competition over collaboration, is fundamentally flawed.
John Taylor Gatto criticizes the conventional education system that pits children against each other in relentless competition for grades. He argues that this method stifles creativity and collaboration, ultimately revealing that the system is outdated and broken, and that true progress requires a shift away from these practices.
In practice
In a speech advocating for educational reform, a speaker might quote Gatto to emphasize the need for collaborative learning environments.
School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
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.
It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
In school, many of us procrastinate and then successfully cram for tests. We get the grades and degrees we need to get the jobs we want, even if we fail to get a good general education.
If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.
write what readers want to read, which isn’t necessarily what you want to write.
Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.
Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
I want to use television not only to entertain, but to help people lead better lives.
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