Great Throughts Treasury

"How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school. It is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas enter into every phase of life, they should have been so little utilized as instruments of education."

"Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations."

"From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time. "

"Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. "

"The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly. "

"The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching. "

"Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled. "

"What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see."

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done. "

"This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge. "

"Play is the answer to how anything new comes about"

"To understand is to invent."

"To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active."

"In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact."