School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes the traditional education system as a place that instills negative habits rather than valuable skills.
John Taylor Gatto's quote suggests that the education system functions more like a prison than a nurturing environment for students. He argues that instead of fostering critical thinking and creativity, schools often promote conformity and rote learning, leading to the development of bad habits that hinder personal growth and true education.
In practice
In a speech about reforming education, one might reference this quote to emphasize the need for change.
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.
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.
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
We need to do teacher training to educate them about what temperament means. Shyness is painful and you want to help a child with shyness - but the underlying temperament of being a careful, sensitive person is to be honoured, valued and respected.
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
Trust your daughters, they are faithful. Honor your daughters, they are honorable. Educate your daughters, they are amazing.
My custom is to read four or five chapters of the Bible every morning immediately after rising. It seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day. It is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.
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