Why should all the major religions of the modern world include a crucial encounter with wilderness--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in ...the desert mountains, Siddhartha in the jungle? And why should the predominant modern view of the origin and development of life have arisen from the five-year wilderness voyage of a Victorian amateur naturalist named Charles Darwin? There evidently is more to wilderness than meets the eye--more than water, timber, minerals, the materials of physical civilized existence.... Placing Darwin in the tradition of Moses and Jesus may seem heresy from both the Judeo-Christian and scientific viewpoints, but I think the roles played by the three figures have been similar. They wrenched their respective cultures out of a complacency that amounted to self-worship and thrust them in new directions that (if not always entirely beneficial) enlarged the human perspective. Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all life. I doubt whether any of the three would have been able to influence his society if he had not been fortified by a season in the wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a very important and fundamental relation between learning and personality development. . . . The two interact in a "circ...ular process." Thus, mastery of symbol systems (letters, words, numbers), reasoning, judging, problem-solving, acquiring and organizing information and all such intellectual functions are fed by and feed into varied aspects of the personality--feelings about oneself, identity, potential for relatedness, autonomy, creativity, and integration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child to be concerned about is the one who is actively unhappy, [in school].... In the long run, a child's emotional developme...nt has a far greater impact on his life than his school performance or the curriculum's richness, so it is wise to do everything possible to change a situation in which a child is suffering excessively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans..., and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Added man-made failure really hurts young children [under six]. No one has to contrive lessons for these youngsters so that they w...ill learn how to lose--they are losers too much of the time. No one has to put them in their place--they know all too well in their hearts the little place they are in. No one has to cut them down to size--their size is painfully small. At this stage in their development we are wise to stay away from competition, from games and races and contests with winners and losers. It matters too much to each child to come in first--they cannot stand the risk of competition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good schools are schools for the development of the whole child. They seek to help children develop to their maximum their social ...powers and their intellectual powers, their emotional capacities, their physical powers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is futile to ask women not to go into business, as futile almost as to insist that water shall not run downhill. One cannot sto...p world movements; and the efforts of women toward emancipation--the natural result of the deadly monotony of their task on the one hand, a jealousy of man's freedom, and a total ignorance of man's struggle as well as of the glory of their own special opportunity--all lead to the condition we are facing to-day. If in any way I can indicate the pain of the struggle, if I can succeed in making women appreciate that there are two sides to the question, one not altogether rosy, and that, although they will undoubtedly win, they will be forced to pay a high price, then I shall have accomplished my purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »