How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.

Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.

Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.

When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.

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

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.