The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.

A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse.

The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.

There is no education but self-education.

Imagination does not stir at the suggestion of the feeble, much diluted stuff that is too often put into children’s hands.

I think we owe it to children to let them dig their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the "fit" book; and this for two reasons: What a child digs for is his own possession; what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer, floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated. I do not mean to say that the lecture and the oral lesson are without their uses; but these uses are, to give impulse and to order knowledge; and not to convey knowledge.

We do not merely give a religious education because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may at the same time be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection.