Great Throughts Treasury

"Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction."

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better."

"A strenuous effort must be made to train young people to think for themselves and take independent charge of their lives."

"Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy."

"Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark."

"The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need."

"The immediate future is going to be tragic for all of us unless we find a way of making the vast educational resources of this country serve the true purpose of education, truth and justice."

"We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains."

"People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved."

"The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher."

"Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky, Before the sun came out. You cannot touch the clouds, you know but you feel the rain and know How glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either, But you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything."

"Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose ... not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember."

"I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child."