The acquisition however perfectly of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use as a contribution to a common and shared life.

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

Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct.

Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.

Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to inquire whether some functional organization would not serve to formulate and manifest public opinion better than the existing methods. It is not irrelevant to the point that a score of passages could be cited in which Jefferson refers to the American Government as an experiment.