Stacey Stark

“Whether it will ever again be possible to take an education easily, in Massachusetts or any other state, will depend upon political decisions made by those — like yourselves — who hold power in trust for the rest of us. I mean no disrespect, only to signal my personal sadness when I say I don’t think those decisions will be made. My reasons for pessimism stem from knowing that failure is built into our political system because it forces our political leadership to depend for its election on the same financial interests which profit from schools staying the way they already are. Schools are a most lucrative source of contracts and an enormous jobs project with sinecures for friends and relatives of your campaign donors. Don’t chalk that up to cynicism: unless you acknowledge why your hands are tied in regard to school change, you’re certain to make the same mistakes year after year in counterfeit reforms. Change isn’t likely to be possible from any political center for the same reason, but it can come from defiant personal decisions made by simple men and women who won’t stand still for their kids being outraged any more — like the revolution of homeschoolers taking place nationwide. This system has had a century to prove itself, that’s enough. It didn’t work at the start except in house-generated fairy tales; it doesn’t work today, and it won’t work better in the future.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Consider this excerpt from a speech delivered in 1940 to the Association for the Advancement of Science by the legendary political philosopher and journalist, Walter Lippmann: ...during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state...the schools and colleges have therefore been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live...deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization...the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it. I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and there is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm—or at least not to oppose—to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Under this outlook, the classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling