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If You Put Fleas In A Shallow Container They Jump Out. But If You Put A Lid On The Container For Just A Short Time, They Hit The Lid Trying To Escape And Learn Quickly Not To Jump So High. They Give Up Their Quest For Freedom. After The Lid Is Removed, The Fleas Remain Imprisond By Their Own Self Policing. So It Is With Life. Most Of Us Let Our Own Fears Or The Impositions Of Others Imprison Us In A World Of Low Expectations.

-John Taylor Gatto

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If You Put Fleas

John Taylor Gatto

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If You Put Fleas In A Shallow Container They Jump Out. But If You Put A Lid On The Container For Just A Short Time, They Hit The Lid Trying To Escape And Learn Quickly Not To Jump So High. They Give Up Their Quest For Freedom. After The Lid Is Removed, The Fleas Remain Imprisond By Their Own Self Policing. So It Is With Life. Most Of Us Let Our Own Fears Or The Impositions Of Others Imprison Us In A World Of Low Expectations.

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Nobody Gives You An Education. If You Want One, You Have To Take It.

The Premise Upon Which Mass Compulsion Schooling Is Based Is Dead Wrong. It Tries To Shoehorn Every Style, Culture, And Personality Into One Ugly Boot That Fits Nobody.

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.

The Shocking Possibility That Dumb People Don't Exist In Sufficient Numbers To Warrant The Millions Of Careers Devoted To Tending Them Will Seem Incredible To You. Yet That Is My Central Proposition: The Mass Dumbness Which Justifies Official Schooling First Had To Be Dreamed Of; It Isn't Real.

As A Writer, Politician, Scientist, And Businessman, [ben] Franklin Had Few Equals Among The Educated Of His Day-though He Left School At Ten. (...)boys Like Andrew Carnegie Who Begged His Mother Not To Send Him To School And Was Well On His Way To Immortality And Fortune At The Age Of Thirteen, Would Be Referred Today For Psychological Counseling; Thomas Edison Would Find Himself In Special Ed Until His Peculiar Genius Had Been Sufficiently Tamed.

You Need Experience, Adventure, And Explorations More Than You Need Algebra!

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.

People Are Less Than Whole Unless They Gather Themselves Voluntarily Into Groups Of Souls In Harmony. Gathering Themselves To Pursue Individual, Family, And Community Dreams Consistent With Their Private Humanity Is What Makes Them Whole; Only Slaves Are Gathered By Others.

It's Been A Horrifying Academic Secret For Decades That The Children Who Walk Away With The Highest Formal Honors, The Valedictorians And National Merit Scholars, Have A Horrendous Performance Record In Later Life.

In Our Secular Society, School Has Become The Replacement For Church, And Like Church It Requires That Its Teachings Must Be Taken On Faith.

The Obligation To Amuse And Instruct Myself Was Entirely My Own, And People Who Didn't Know That Were Childish People, To Be Avoided If Possible. Certainly Not To Be Trusted.

Why Are You So Docile When You Give Up Your Child To A Government Agent Called A Schoolteacher?

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.

A Lot Of The Strings That Hold Us Like Puppets Are Really Inventions Of Our Own Minds. I'm Not Saying That There Aren't Armies And Police And Various Ways To Punish Deviants, But There Isn't Any Way To Punish A Large Number Of Deviants. It's Too Expensive To Even Try. So, The Solution Is To Colonize The Minds Of Children As They're Growing Up, So That They Become Their Own Police, And To Report On Others Who Are Deviating.

The Truth Is That Schools Don't Really Teach Anything Except How To Obey Orders.

Schools [are]...institutions Monopolizing The Daytimes Of Childhood.

For Reasons That Are Both Fair And Foul - But Mostly For Fair Reasons - We Have Come Under The Domain Of A Scientific-management System Whose Ambitions Are Endless. They Want To Manage Every Second Of Our Lives, Every Expenditure That We Make. And The Schools Are The Training Ground To Create A Population That's Easy To Manage.

Grades Don't Measure Anything Other Than Your Relevant Obedience To A Manager.

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.

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.

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.

Child Labor Becomes A Label Of Condemnation In Spite Of Its Ancient Function As The Quickest, Most Reliable Way To Human Independence

I've Noticed A Fascinating Phenomenon In My Twenty-five Years Of Teaching - That 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.

Children Allowed To Take Responsibility And Given A Serious Part In The Larger World Are Always Superior To Those Merely Permitted To Play And Be Passive.

I Teach How To Fit Into A World I Don't Want To Live In. I Just Can't Do It Anymore.

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.

Individuality, Family, And Community Are, By Definition, Expressions Of Singular Organization, Never Of "one-right-way" Thinking On The Grand Scale. Children And Families Need Some Relief From Government Surveillance And Intimidation If Original Expressions Belonging To Them Are To Develop. Without These Freedom Has No Meaning.

Is It Any Wonder That Socrates Was Outraged At The Accusation He Took Money To Teach? Even Then, Philosophers Saw Clearly The Inevitable Direction The Professionalization Of Teaching Would Take, That Of Pre-empting The Teaching Function, Which, In A Healthy Community, Belongs To Everyone.

When You Take The Free Will Out Of Education, That Turns It Into Schooling.

We Have Been Taught (that Is, Schooled) In This Country To Think Of 'success' As Synonymous With, Or At Least Dependent Upon, 'schooling,' But Historically That Isn’t True In Either An Intellectual Or A Financial Sense. And Plenty Of People Throughout The World Today Find A Way To Educate Themselves Without Resorting To A System Of Compulsory Secondary Schools That All Too Often Resemble Prison.

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.

Teaching Is A Function, Not A Profession. Anything With Something To Offer Can Teach.

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.

Shouldn't We Also Ask Ourselves What The Consequences Are Of Scrambling To Provide The "most" Of Everything To Our Children In A World Of Fast Dwindling Resources?

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.

Creative Work And Critical Thought, Which Produces New Knowledge, Can't Be Conditioned; Indeed, Conditioning Prevents These Things From Ever Happening.

Schools Stifle Family Originality By Appropriating The Critical Time Needed For Any Sound Idea Of Family To Develop - Then They Blame The Family For Its Failure To Be A Family.

Anyone Who Is More Interested In Human Beings Than In The Rules Is A Threat To The System.

Children Do Not Learn In School; They Are Babysat. It Takes Maybe 50 Hours To Teach Reading, Writing, And Arithmetic. After That, Students Can Teach Themselves. Mainly What School Does Is To Keep The Children Off The Streets And Out Of The Job Market.

School Is A Twelve-year Jail Sentence Where Bad Habits Are The Only Curriculum Truly Learned.

You Either Learn Your Way Towards Writing Your Own Script In Life, Or You Unwittingly Become An Actor In Someone Else's Script.

If You Put Fleas In A Shallow Container They Jump Out. But If You Put A Lid On The Container For Just A Short Time, They Hit The Lid Trying To Escape And Learn Quickly Not To Jump So High. They Give Up Their Quest For Freedom. After The Lid Is Removed, The Fleas Remain Imprisond By Their Own Self Policing. So It Is With Life. Most Of Us Let Our Own Fears Or The Impositions Of Others Imprison Us In A World Of Low Expectations.

If You Live In A Material Universe Where Acquiring Things Is Very Important To You, Then Family Is An Absolute Deterrent To Maintaining That Sort Of A World, Because Family Involves Values Like Affection, And Sympathy, And Passion, And Types Of Pleasure That Lead Nowhere In A Material Sense.

Acquiring Things

Our Cultural Dilemma Has Nothing To Do With Children Who Don't Read Very Well. It Lies Instead In The Difficulty Of Finding A Way To Restore Meaning And Purpose To Modern Life.

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.

Genius Is An Exceedingly Common Human Quality, Probably Natural To Most Of Us.

School Is The First Impression Children Get Of Organized Society. Like Most First Impressions It Is The Lasting One. Life Is Dull And Stupid, Only Coke Provides Relief. And Other Products, Too, Of Course.

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.

Looking Back On A 30-year Teaching Career Full Of Rewards And Prizes, Somehow I Can't Completely Believe That I Spent My Time On Earth Institutionalized; I Can't Believe That Centralized Schooling Is Allowed To Exist At All As A Gigantic Indoctrination And Sorting Machine, Robbing People Of Their Children. Did It Really Happen? Was This My Life? God Help Me.

We Could Encourage The Best Qualities Of Youthfulness - Curiosity, Adventure, Resilience, The Capacity For Surprising Insight Simply By Being More Flexible About Time, Texts, And Tests, By Introducing Kids Into Truly Competent Adults, And By Giving Each Student What Autonomy He Or She Needs In Order To Take A Risk Every Now And Then. But We Don't Do That.

I Don’t Think We’ll Get Rid Of Schools Any Time Soon, Certainly Not In My Lifetime, But If We’re Going To Change What’s Rapidly Becoming A Disaster Of Ignorance, We Need To Realize That The Institution “schools” Very Well, But It Does Not “educate”; That’s Inherent In The Design Of The Thing. It’s Not The Fault Of Bad Teachers Or Too Little Money Spent. It’s Just Impossible For Education And Schooling To Be The Same Thing.

What's Gotten In The Way Of Education In The United States Is A Theory Of Social Engineering That Says There Is One Right Way To Proceed With Growing Up.

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.

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.

Curiosity Has No Important Place In My Work, Only Conformity.

Whatever An Education Is, It Should Make You A Unique Individual, Not A Conformist.

Growth And Mastery Come Only To Those Who Vigorously Self-direct. Initiating, Creating, Doing, Reflecting, Freely Associating, Enjoying Privacy-these Are Precisely What The Structures Of Schooling Are Set Up To Prevent, On One Pretext Or Another.

...good Things Happen To The Human Spirit When It Is Left Alone.

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.

It Only Takes About 50 Contact Hours To Transmit Basic Literacy And Math Skills Well Enough That Kids Can Be Self-teachers From Then On. The Cry For 'basic Skills' Practice Is A Smokescreen Behind Which Schools Pre-empt The Time Of Children For Twelve Years And Teach Them The Six Lessons I've Just Taught You.

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.

Government Schooling Made People Dumber, Not Brighter; Made Families Weaker; Ruined Formal Religion With Its Hard-sell Exclusion Of God; Set The Class Structure In Stone By Dividing Children Into Classes And Setting Them Against One Another; And Has Been Midwife To An Alarming Concentration Of Wealth And Power In The Hands Of A Fraction Of The National Community.

There Isn't A Right Way To Become Educated; There Are As Many Ways As There Are Fingerprints.

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.

By Bells And Many Other Similar Techniques They (schools) Teach That Nothing Is Worth Finishing. The Gross Error Of This Is Progressive: If Nothing Is Worth Finishing Then By Extension Nothing Is Worth Starting Either. Few Children Are So Thick-skulled They Miss The Point.

In A Home School, The Kid Does 95% Of The Work. But In A School System, Since It's An Indoctrination System, A Teacher Has To Do 95% Of The Work.

Schools Were Designed By Horace Mann And Barnard Sears And Harper Of The University Of Chicago And Thorndyke Of Columbia Teachers College And Some Other Men To Be Instruments Of The Scientific Management Of A Mass Population. Schools Are Intended To Produce Through The Application Of Formulae, Formulaic Human Beings Whose Behavior Can Be Predicted And Controlled.

Self-knowledge Is The Only Basis Of True Knowledge.

One Of The First Things A Family Tries To Teach Its Children Is The Difference Between Good And Evil, Right And Wrong. One Of The First Things Our Schools Do Is Destroy That Distinction.

God Was Pitched Out Of Forced Schooling On His Ear After Wwii. This Wasn't Because Of Any Constitutional Proscription-there Was None That Anyone Had Been Able To Find In Over A Century And A Half-but Because The Political State And Corporate Economy Considered The Western Spiritual Tradition Too Dangerous A Competitor. And It Is.

• As Society Rapidly Changes, Individuals Will Have To Be Able To Function Comfortably In A World That Is Always In Flux. Knowledge Will Continue To Increase At A Dizzying Rate. This Means That A Content-based Curriculum, With A Set Body Of Information To Be Imparted To Students, Is Entirely Inappropriate As A Means Of Preparing Children For Their Adult Roles.

The Economy Schoolchildren Currently Expect To Live Under And Serve Would Not Survive A Generation Of Young People Trained To Think Critically.

Who Besides A Degraded Rabble Would Voluntarily Present Itself To Be Graded And Classified Like Meat? No Wonder School Is Compulsory.

Close Reading Of Tough-minded Writing Is Still The Best, Cheapest, And Quickest Method Known For Learning To Think For Yourself... Reading, And Rigorous Discussion Of That Reading In A Way That Obliges You To Formulate A Position And Support It Against Objections, Is An Operational Definition Of Education... Reading, Analysis, And Discussion Is The Way We Develop Reliable Judgment, The Principle Way We Come To Penetrate Covert Movements Behind The Facade Of Public Appearances.

I Taught Public School For 26 Years, But I Just Can't Do It Anymore. For Years I Asked The School Board To Let Me Teach A Curriculum That Doesn't Hurt Kids, But They Always Had Other Fish To Fry. If You Hear Of A Job Where I Don't Have To Hurt Kids To Make A Living, Let Me Know. The Truth Is That Schools Don't Really Teach Anything, But Blind Obedience.

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 A Period Of Twelve Years? Could There Be A More Radical Idea Than That? Back In Colonial Days In America, If You Proposed That Kind Of Idea, They'd Burn You At The Stake, You Mad Person! It's A Mad Idea!

Although Teachers Do 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.

Slowly I Began To Realize That The Bells And The Confinement, The Crazy Sequences, The Age-segregation, The Lack Of Privacy, The Constant Surveillance, And All The Rest Of The National Curriculum Of Schooling Were Designed Exactly As If Someone Had Set Out To Prevent Children From Learning How To Think And Act, To Coax Them Into Addiction And Dependent Behavior.

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