An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.
Balance is balancing.
The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.
Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.
The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.
Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind.
We sometimes talk as if “original research” were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.
Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.
Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.
Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
The phrase “think for one’s self” is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one’s self, it isn’t thinking.
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.
Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate – unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.
Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.
Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.