Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.

The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.

Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.

To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.