Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.
Interpretation
Working with children fosters democratic values due to their openness and lack of prejudice.
This quote emphasizes the idea that children are instinctively more accepting and open-minded than adults, which makes them ideal candidates for instilling the values of democracy. Since children have yet to develop biases or prejudices, educating them on democratic principles allows for a more genuine and effective cultivation of these ideals in society.
In practice
In a talk about influencing future generations, one might say, 'As Margaret Halsey points out, working with children is crucial for educating democracy.'
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.
The child builds his inmost self out of the deeply held impressions he receives.
I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers.
If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.
To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
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