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.
Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones.
But once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds, different kinds of strengths -- some people are good in thinking spatially, some in thinking language, others are very logical, other people need to be hands on and explore actively and try things out -- then education, which treats everybody the same way, is actually the most unfair education.
But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a simple necessity.
The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.
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