JohnTaylorGatto.com

A website about your disenchantment with school, offering a wealth of information.

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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 part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does. 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. 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". - John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990



"I've taught public school for 26 years but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I'm going to quit, I think. 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." - John Taylor Gatto announcing his resignation from teaching in an Op/Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal



New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990 and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1990 and 1991.



"We're waiting here in Allentown for the Pennsylvania we never found. For the promises our teachers gave.....They never taught us what was real".