An education is the capacity to author your own life instead of merely accepting the one handed to you.
What Does it Mean to Be Educated? – by ASDE
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
John Taylor Gatto via What Does it Mean to Be Educated? – by ASDE
Education is not memorization. It is the activation of the imagination and a path towards liberation.
Dr. Christopher Emdin
Whatever an education is, it must empower you to lead your own life. It must minimize your chances of being manipulated, of being made a pawn, of being an actor in someone else’s play. Any place that claims to “educate” must give young people actual autonomy, help them develop actual competencies, and facilitate actual social connections. It must produce self-aware and self-motivated humans, not anxiety-riddled worker bees awaiting their next orders. Places of education must lift people up and bring them together — as we envision the ideal of school — not crush their spirits and isolate them — as too often is the reality of school. But do such places exist? Can they exist?
What Does it Mean to Be Educated? – by ASDE
How strange and self-defeating that a supposedly free country should train its young for life in totalitarianism.
The Teenage Liberation Handbook : How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education
I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.
I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.
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.
I quit, I think – Education Revolution | Alternative Education Resource Organization
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
John Taylor Gatto via John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America’s Most Courageous Teacher
The most overwhelming reality of school is control.
The Teenage Liberation Handbook : How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
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. It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its “homework.” “How will they learn to read?” you ask, and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.
John Taylor Gatto via John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America’s Most Courageous Teacher
Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
John Taylor Gatto via John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America’s Most Courageous Teacher
You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life or you become an unwitting actor in somebody else’s script.
John Taylor Gatto via John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America’s Most Courageous Teacher
Only the fresh air from millions upon millions of freely made choices will create the educational climate we need to realize a better destiny. No team of experts can possibly possess the wisdom to impose a successful solution to the problem inherent in a philosophy of centralized social management; solutions that endure are always local, always personal. Universal prescriptions are the problem of modern schooling, academic research which pursues the will-o-the-wisp of average children and average stages of development makes for destructive social policy, it is a sea anchor dragging against advancement, creating the problems it begs for money to solve. But here is a warning: should we ever agree to honor the singularity of children which forced schooling contravenes, if we ever agree to set the minds of children free, we should understand they would make a world that would create and re-create itself exponentially, a world complex beyond the power of any group of managers to manage. Such free beings would have to be self-managing. And the future would never again be easily predictable.
John Taylor Gatto’s prescription for fixing American education
Could this be what education is really about: learning to live together in difference? The very word education, after all, comes from the Latin ex- (‘out’) plus ducere (‘to lead’). Education literally leads us out into the world. And as a way of leading out, it is fundamentally a practice of exposure. Its purpose is not to arm ourselves with knowledge, or to shore up our defences so that we can better cope with adversity. It is rather to disarm, to relinquish the security of established standpoints and positions, and by the same token, to attend more closely to the world around us and respond to what we find there with skill and sensitivity. Its primary commitment, in short, is to the fostering not of rationality but response-ability. If the voice of reason belongs at once to everyone and no one, with response-ability every voice is different, yet as in a choir or conversation, it comes forth only through its participation with the voices of others.
This kind of education doesn’t separate knowledge from life, but joins with the very forces of life – forces that create ideas, ways of experiencing the world – in its ongoing fashioning. In their education, teachers and students embark together on a journey that may be difficult, even uncomfortable, with no certain outcome. This calls for care, patience, and a willingness to experiment. Nevertheless, the journey is one in which generations can collaborate in finding a way into the future. It is not, then, for teachers to transmit knowledge readymade. Their task is rather to set an example, to serve as constant companions for their students and tireless critics of their work. And it is for students to follow in their footsteps while improvising a passage for themselves.
Psarologaki, Liana. Cultures of Erudition and Desire in University Pedagogy: Thoughts on Practice-led Curricula Before, Through, and Beyond Deleuze (Rethinking Education) (pp. 11-12). Taylor & Francis.
Never Produce Learned Monsters
On the first day of the new school year, all the teachers in one private school received the following note from their principal-
Dear Teacher:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is this: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
Teacher and Child; A Book for Parents and Teachers : Ginott, Haim G
