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.
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.
All genuine learning comes through experience.
Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
One lives with so many bad deeds on one’s conscience and some good intentions in one’s heart.
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
No man’s credit is as good as his money.
By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.
Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling.
I do not think that any thorough-going modification of college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction.
Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter.
Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.
The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.
There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children.
Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.