It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.

The immediate future is going to be tragic for all of us unless we find a way of making the vast educational resources of this country serve the true purpose of education, truth and justice.

The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better , if less "showily." Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.