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Tag: John Taylor Gatto
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
George Washington
“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero.”
Voltaire
“There is in all of a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because the law makes them so.”
Frédéric Bastiat
“Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?”
John Taylor Gatto
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.”
John Taylor Gatto
“The enemies of freedom from the left, right, and middle have one common denominator: faith in the state.”
Roland Baader
“Democracy is indispensable to socialism.”
Vladimir Lenin
“Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?”
Robert Nozick
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”
Edward Abbey
“The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use.”
Albert J. Nock
“The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”
Alexander Hamilton
“Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”
John Taylor Gatto
FROM AMERICAN DREAM TO AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
For most of the ninety years since James Truslow Adams coined the term American Dream, most Americans still believed the fairy tale of the American Dream, that no matter how humble your beginnings, everyone had a fair chance to become a success in America, based upon your individual talent, intelligence, work ethic and a society that rewarded those who exceled. Sadly, that dream is no longer achievable for most Americans. Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist.
“But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position…
The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” – James Truslow Adams – Epic of America – 1931
Continue reading “FROM AMERICAN DREAM TO AMERICAN NIGHTMARE”
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“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.”
John Taylor Gatto
“I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.”
John Taylor Gatto
“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
John Taylor Gatto
“I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.”
John Taylor Gatto
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.”
John Taylor Gatto
“…good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.”
John Taylor Gatto
“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.”
John Taylor Gatto
“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
John Taylor Gatto
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.”
John Taylor Gatto
“Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects.”
Leo Tolstoy
“I find it very hard to vote for someone who’s going to have power over me.”
Norm Macdonald
“Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently.”
John Taylor Gatto
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
P. J. O’Rourke
“I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.”
Milton Friedman
“Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.”
Lysander Spooner
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Freedom and Property Rights are inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.”
George Washington
“There could be no greater error than to conclude that statism caused prosperity.”
Leonard Read
“There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.”
John Taylor Gatto
“No political ritual can alter morality. No election can make an evil act into a good act. If it is bad for you to do something, then it is bad for those in “government” to do it.”
Larken Rose
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“As long as we live beyond our means, we are destined to live beneath our means.”
Ron Paul
“You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.”
John Taylor Gatto
“A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.”
Robert A. Heinlein
“Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”
Herbert Hoover
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?”
John Taylor Gatto
“All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.”
H. L. Mencken
“Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.”
George Reisman
“If citizens wish to retain their liberty, they cannot assume that those who seek power over them are honest. Skepticism of government is one of the most important-and most forgotten-bulwarks of freedom.”
James Bovard
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know nothing about, and having those strangers work on your child’s mind, out of your sight, for twelve years?”
John Taylor Gatto
“In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Why doesn’t everybody just leave everybody else the hell alone?”
Jimmy Durante
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence.”
John Taylor Gatto
“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.”
William O. Douglas
“Government is, and always has been, the greatest criminal threat to the peaceful members of society.”
Richard Ebeling
“Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.”
Nassim Taleb
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.”
John Taylor Gatto
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”
I.F. Stone
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that’s a pretty likely sign that it shouldn’t be a law.”
Unknown
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
John Taylor Gatto
“To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.
(writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury)”
H.L. Mencken
“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.”
Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School