Readers are leaders, or "An operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense"

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense... Reading, analysis and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principal way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.

-John Taylor Gatto

quoted in So Much More by Anna Sofia Botkin and Elizabeth Botkin