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Do we really need school? i don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. is this deadly routine really necessary? and if so, for what? don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
-John Taylor Gatto
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Do We Really Need School? I Don't

John Taylor Gatto
Do we really need school? i don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. is this deadly routine really necessary? and if so, for what? don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
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Education Teacher Reading

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At age nine, i got a paper route. sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. i also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. i owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. when i didn't collect, the balance came out of my profit. my average income was six dollars a week.
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On a certain scale, it does look like i do a lot. but that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when i’m going to be able to get started. and the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
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This is a devastating problem, is, the longer our children are in school, the worse they do. year after year after year, our children in america are falling further behind. our 3- and 4-year-olds enter kindergarten ok, and they fall further and further behind. each year, children in other countries are learning more than children in this country. and so the gap between american student performance in singapore and finland and south korea and canada and these other countries, the gap widens year after year after year.
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Reading is everything. reading makes me feel like i've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. reading makes me smarter. reading gives me something to talk about later on. reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. reading is grist. reading is bliss.
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