John Taylor
John Taylor
teaching taken school
In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
real school careers
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.
school world want
I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.
curiosity important conformity
Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
mother school boys
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.
inspiring giving want
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.
people obligation my-own
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.
adventure kids order
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.
children crazy thinking
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.
school childhood institutions
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
thinking people generations
The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.
teacher children school
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.
hurt jobs school
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.
school meat wonder
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.