i am so confident of the potentialities of education when it is treated as intelligently directed development of the possibilities inherent in ordinary experience that i do not feel it necessary to criticize here the other route nor to advance arguments in favor of taking the route of experience. the only ground for anticipating failure in taking this path resides to my mind in the danger that experience and the experimental method will not be adequately conceived. there is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction. hence the only ground i can see for even a temporary reaction against the standards, aims, and methods of the newer education is the failure of educators who professedly adopt them to be faithful to them in practice. as i have emphasized more than once, the road of the new education is not an easier one to follow than the old road but a more strenuous and difficult one.
from experience and education
1938
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