Carolina

“Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless.”
― John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”
― John Taylor Gatto

“I’d been looking around the world for clues as to what other countries were doing right, but the important distinctions were not about spending or local control or curriculum; none of that mattered very much. Policies mostly worked in the margins. The fundamental difference was a psychological one. The education superpowers believed in rigor. People in these countries agreed on the purpose of school: School existed to help students master complex academic material. Other things mattered, too, but nothing mattered as much.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way