Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.

Constant muscular activity was natural for the child, and, therefore, the immense effort of the drillmaster teachers to make children sit still was harmful and useless.

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.

Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden... The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite.