“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 , book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 14

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John Taylor Gatto photo
John Taylor Gatto 40
American teacher, book author 1935–2018

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“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... The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

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“You insist on the example [of the death penalty]. Why? For what it teaches. What do you want to teach with your example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach thou shalt not kill? By killing.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Vous tenez à l’exemple [de la peine de mort]. Pourquoi? Pour ce qu’il enseigne. Que voulez-vous enseigner avec votre exemple? Qu’il ne faut pas tuer. Et comment enseignez-vous qu’il ne faut pas tuer? En tuant.
"Plaidoyer contre la peine de mort" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Plaidoyer_contre_la_peine_de_mort_-_Victor_Hugo [An argument against the death penalty], Assemblée Constituante, Paris (15 September 1848)

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“A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“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 (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

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Source: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers (2013) p. xxii

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“Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.”

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The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

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“I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church, but I’m gonna be up in your face if you’re gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me they’ve got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. Because that’s when we’re gonna fight!”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator
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“Experiments are intended to teach, and not to mystify.”

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on the experiments used in his lectures on Galvanism. [William Sturgeon, A Course of Twelve Elementary Lectures on Galvanism, London : Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1843, 33-34, http://www.archive.org/details/courseoftwelveel00sturrich]

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“You want to know how Egyptians pulled the brains out of mummies. or built the pyramids, or cursed King Tut's tomb? My dad's your man.”

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“As a teacher and parent, I've had a very personal interest in seeking new ways of teaching. Like most other teachers and parents, I've been well aware — painfully so, at times — that the whole teaching/learning process is extraordinarily imprecise, most of the time a hit-and-miss operation. Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all.”

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