The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".

Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. ... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.

...compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a separation of that mode of activity commonly called 'practice' from insight; of imagination from executive 'doing.' Each of these activities is then assigned its own place in which it must abide. Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature.