The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.

Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.

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.

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.

It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.

The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.