Weapons of Mass Instruction Quotes

“I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen — certification probably guarantees it won’t.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“when competition is seen as essential to a good life, when winning against one’s neighbors is put at the heart of society, business thrives. To win, others have to lose: the more losers, the better winning feels.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“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. Surely this is one of the most radical acts in human history, not the least of its breathtakingly radical assertions being that you must attend for your own good!”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“What Hegel taught that intrigued the powerful then and now was that history could be deliberately managed by skillfully provoking crises out of public view and then demanding national unity to meet those crises — a disciplined unity under cover of which leadership privileges approached the absolute.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“the incredible inventiveness of the American people, a natural by-product of three factors: an open-source learning tradition; a heterogeneous, mixed-age society which didn’t exclude the young from full participation; and a government presence without heavy-handedness.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Without clear awareness of the short arc of life, nothing means very much.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“The dark side of the Welfare State midwifed by Beatrice Webb and the Fabian socialists is not its superficial purpose of being kind, but its intention of killing with kindness, and thus protecting the interests of the better people, non-violently.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“When you flip hamburgers, sit at a computer all day, unpack and shelve merchandise from China year after year, you manage the tedium better if you have a shallow inner life, one you can escape through booze, drugs, sex, media, or other low level addictive behaviors. Easier to keep sane if your inner life is shallow. School, thought Harris the great American schoolman, should prepare ordinary men and women for lifetimes of alienation. Can you say he wasn’t fully rational?”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“It is natural businessmen should seek to influence the enactment and administration of laws, national and international, and that they should try to control education.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“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

“It was from Washington’s bribes, subsidies, and cajolings that institutional schooling spread, not from the merit of the idea.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“there are many ways to interdict the growth of competence, of clear thinking, of forceful purpose, and each is a talking choo-choo in different guise: think of slasher flicks, think of pornography, think of Big Macs or tabloid/network news — each is easy to take, each seemingly an inconsequential time-killer. But ah! The ensemble of them playing their mindless tunes — the Death of a Thousand Cuts!”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“...nüfusu "idare edilebilir" kılmayı amaç edinmiş bir eğitim sistemi.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Not ortalaması."; evet, hepimizin bir not ortalaması var.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Avrupa'da diktatörlerin güç kullanıp zorlayarak yapmaya çalıştıklarını eğitim yoluyla başarmak.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Ya kendi senaryonuzu yazarsınız veya bir başkasının senaryosundan size biçilen rolü oynarsınız.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Senin diplomanda bir "tarih öğretmeni" olduğun yazıyor, oysa öğrettiğin şey propagandadan başka bir şey değil.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Size ezberlemeniz gerektiği söylenen şeyleri ezberleyerek özgür olamazsınız.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Her tercih, bir başka tercihi engeller.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“...hayatımı başka birinin el yazısındaki bir karaktermiş gibi yaşadım.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Güç, hiçbir zaman göründüğü yerde değildir.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“...vücutlar sosyal sınıfın görünür simgeleridir.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Çocukları aynı çatı altında toplayıp her türlü sorumluluk ve bağımsızlık duygusundan azade kılarak açgözlülük, fesatlık, kıskançlık ve korku gibi duyguların tohumlarının atılabileceğini, bu şekilde çocukların yaşça büyüseler de zihinsel anlamda çocuk kalmaya devam edeceklerini çok iyi biliyorlardı... Artık olgunluk, neredeyse hayatın her alanından söküp atılmıştır. Boşanmayı kolaylaştıran yasalar ilişkilere emek harcama ihtiyacını ortadan kaldırdı, kolay kredi imkanları kişinin finansal anlamda kendini kontrol etmesini gereksiz kıldı, kolay eğlence kendimizi eğlendirecek uğraşılara duyulan ihtiyacı yok etti, kolay cevaplar soru sorma ihtiyacını ortadan kaldırdı. Yargılarımızı ve irademizi normal şartlarda bir yetişkinin kendisine edilmiş bir hakaret olarak göreceği siyasi vaazların ve ticari kandırmacaların eline teslim eden çocuk bir millet olup çıktık.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Eğitim: Bir Kitle İmha Silahı

“The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man. Real education can only begin out of a foundation of self-awareness. Know the truth of yourself or you are nothing but a pathetic human resource. Your life will have missed it’s point.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Take a second to think about these utopian algorithms — dividing people from one another and from their natural allies, is right at the head of the list, but all require wiping the slate as clean of close emotional ties — even ties to yourself! — as possible. Family, deep friendships, church, culture, tradition, anything which might contradict the voice of authority, is suspect.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“The myth of a golden age of public schooling is the creation of Ell-wood P. Cubberley, Dean of Teacher Education at Stanford University. There never was such a thing.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Consider this excerpt from a speech delivered in 1940 to the Association for the Advancement of Science by the legendary political philosopher and journalist, Walter Lippmann: ...during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state...the schools and colleges have therefore been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live...deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization...the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it. I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and there is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling