John Dewey Quotes

Adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.

An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.

The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement

Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him.

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.

It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.

When "reality" is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import; at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeableemotional state.

Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct.

The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities

Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.

Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate - unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education.

Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.

An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.

Despite the never ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.

Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.

Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.

We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all.

It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.

Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified.

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.

We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.

If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization.

Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.

The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.

Understanding one another means that objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common pursuit.

Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.

Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.

One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.

For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.

Time with his old flail Beat me full sore; Till: Hold, I cried, I'll stand no more. Then I heard a wail And looking spied How love's little bow Had laid time low.

Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.

The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.

The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged.

The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

You can teach students to develop the ability to think reflectively, and you can help them understand what this means, but if they are not inclined to do so they never will.

Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.

I do not think that any thorough-going modification of college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction.

To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

Mind is a verb not a noun.

The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences.

Intelligence is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn, and courage in readjustment.

We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society.

It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.