John Dewey Quotes

Instruction is important.

Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.

Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.

Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.

a problem well put is half solved.

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.

All genuine education comes about through experience.

Always make the other person feel important.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

The need for growth, for development, for change, is fundamental to life.

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.

Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling.

Where there is giving there must be taking.

Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.

In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up.

One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire.

Nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving.

To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.

Every living being needs continually renewed, and education is simply the chief process by which renewal occurs.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.

Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?

By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.

Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.

The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.

To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.

Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.

If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.

I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth

We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.

When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.