The main characteristic of play – whether of child or adult – is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.
Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.
It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child’s interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.
In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.
The fish will be the last to discover water.
Whoever reflects recognizes that there are empty and lonely spaces between one’s experiences.
Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.
We carry with us habits of thought and taste fostered in some nearly forgotten classroom by a certain teacher.
Agency presupposes choice.
In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli.
The notion of multiple literacies recognized that there are many ways of being-and of becoming-literate, and that how literacy develops and how it is used depend on the particular social and cultural setting.
We need to conceive of ourselves as “agents” impelled by self-generated intentions.
Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.
There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.
We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.
Knowledge is justified belief.
We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones.
I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.
Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.
Contrary to common sense there is no unique “real world” that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.
Perhaps the most basic thing that can be said about human memory, after a century of intensive research, is that unless a detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten. Detailed material is conserved in memory by the use of simplified ways of representing it.