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.
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.