I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.

That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose.

There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified.

A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary.

The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.

Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.