John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. xxxiv
“I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but 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 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.”
— John Taylor Gatto, book Dumbing Us Down
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv
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John Taylor Gatto40
American teacher, book author 1935–2018Related quotes
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