William Torrey Harris Quotes (1835-1909)

“The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.”

“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

“The progress of the world moves from the consolidation of the three powers of government in one person to the co-ordination of those powers in separate departments; from the constitutional forms in which one type prevails (as that of the family prevails in the patriarchal government of China) to the form in which the family, civil society, the State, and the Church are independent and complete in their functions without usurping the functions of one another. This will destroy the illusion of socialism, which wishes the State to absorb civil society, as well as the illusion of the “Nihilist,” who wishes civil society to absorb the State.”