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.
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?
There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.
It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.
We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides a moral standard for personal conduct.
The demand for liberty is a demand for power, either for possession of powers of action not already possessed or for retention and expansion of powers already possessed.
The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged.
Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
The premium so often put in schools upon external “discipline,” and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education.
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. To free one’s mind of chains is to free it of the care of what is acceptable or viewed so by society, this is when true freedom is discovered.