Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackl… - John Taylor Gatto

There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen – that probably guarantees it won't... We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up.