“There is absolutely no justification for this sequence of subjects in any school in the country—there is no justification. By following one by another, you confuse people—bewilder them. All that’s left behind is the need to do well on the test. Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that you are finally caught up in the wonder—the glamour—of quadratic equations. A bell rings. Everyone clears out, teacher says, “Come on, you’ll be late for your next class!” You say, “I’m lost in the magic of quadratic equations! I want to finish this!” “You can’t finish.” “Why not?” “I don’t know why not. Because you have to go and think poetically.” And then, when you’re lost in the rapture of the Italian sonnet, and just about to come up with that tricky missing rhyme, the bell rings and somebody says, “You have to go take off your clothes and run around a filthy gymnasium and have people scream at you.” If you wanted to created a mechanism to drive people insane—I mean literally insane, so they don’t follow their own best interests, their own good common sense—that’s the system you would invent.” —
John Taylor Gatto, Author, from The War of Kids (2009)
And this is why I loathe school. Ignore that 4.0 GPA. That says shit.
(via viciousfrenzy)