A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning.

What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.

As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.

The relationships of our present social life are so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position could not readily share in many of the most important of them. Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome.

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.‎

Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.

All genuine education comes about through experience.