John Dewey Quotes

We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.

In a world that has so largely engaged in a mad and often brutally harsh race for material gain by means of ruthless competition, it behooves the school to make ceaseless and intelligently organized effort to develop above all else the will for co-operation and the spirit which sees in every other individual one who has an equal right to share in the cultural and material fruits of collective human invention, industry, skill and knowledge

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.

Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order

To me faith means not worrying.

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life.

Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.

The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with ... dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.

Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.

What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.

We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference.

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

The need for growth - what we might call immaturity - is not a negative state of being.

Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.

No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

It is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.

Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.