Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.
Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. ‘Thought’ represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.
Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.
What’s in a question, you ask? Everything. It evokes stimulating responses or stultifies inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.
To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions – that is art.
The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.
For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.
The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.
The educative value of manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play, depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are dramatizations.
The school must be “a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons”.
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.
Resort to military force is a first sure sign that we are giving up the struggle for the democratic way of life, and that the Old World has conquered morally as well as geographically succeeding in imposing upon us its ideals and methods.
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.
What holds for adults holds even more for children, sensitive and conscious of differences. I certainly hope that the Board of Education will think very, very seriously before it introduces this division and antagonism in our public schools.
The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.
Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?