Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order

How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

When "reality" is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import; at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeableemotional state.

Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life.

Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations.

Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.