Our John

By now most of you might have heard- John Taylor Gatto has suffered a serious stroke. Here's a message from Jerry Mintz at AERO: 

I talked to his wife who told me that John was in the hospital for a week and has been in a rehab center for three weeks. He has speech problems and problems on his left side. But she said he can walk 40 steps now and his speech is getting better. We need John to return to full health! If you would like to send some good words to John you can write to me and I’ll put them together and get the messages to him. Send to JerryAERO@AOL.com

I've been thinking about John these past few weeks-actually since school started. And I've been thinking about all that he has given me."Genius is as cheap as dirt." "You don't get an education. You take an education."
"Really educated people favor love, curiosity, reverence, and empathy rather than material wealth."
"Really educated people think for themselves; observe, analyze, and discover truth without relying on the opinions of others."

John is funny. I really appreciate his sense of humor in the discourse on growing without school (which can be become preachy or over-zealous at times). "Would you give your TV set to a person you know nothing about? Yet that's what we do with our children."

John tells it like it is: "if you weren’t earning money and adding value to the town by the age of seven, you were considered a jerk. I swept out a printing office daily, sold newspapers, shoveled snow, cut grass, and sold lemonade," he says about growing up in Monongahela, Pennsylvania.

"That was the American dream, that you could write the script to your own life"
Keep writing that script John!