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.

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.

Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.

Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.