Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.
Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.
Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.
If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization.
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.
I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
I believe that the school must represent present life – life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.
Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.
Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.
Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.
The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.
Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.
Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.
Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.
Man’s home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.
Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.