“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the Sate of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted–sometimes with guns–by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder: Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent and that after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.”

–John Taylor Gatto, January 31, 1990, from his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year Award given by the New York State Senate