Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are st… - John Taylor Gatto

Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression and intimidation. The schools we’ve allowed to develop can’t work to teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone’s life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Official favor, grades, and other trinkets of subordination have no connection with education; they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not of freedom.

Regimentation, methodization, systematization, standardization , organization, coordination, disciplined arrangements, conformity - these things are at the very heart of our national state policies, and are the poison that has killed our families and left individual survivors in a numbed, angry, nearly hysterical condition.

Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within…