An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.

Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.

If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.

A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.