Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.

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

When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.

I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.