[...] the mind of savage people is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backwards institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development.
p 43
Only by engaging in a joint activity, where one person's use of material and tools is consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained.
Increasing complexity of social life requires a longer period of infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this prolongation of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of acquiring variable and novel modes of control. Hence it provides a further push to social progress.
The conception that the result of the educative process is capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and taught from the only point to which it may be fruitly directed—namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.
A peculiar combination of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural. [...] The alleged biological truth that the individual in his growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the evolution of animal life in the progress of forms from the simplest to the most complex (or expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past. [Herbart]
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
[...] acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. To forsee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, to select and to order objects and our own capacities. To do these things means to have a mind—for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and their relationships to one another.
The obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.