John Quotes

The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.

Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.

Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.

A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.

Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.

It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.

The school has the function of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters.

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.

The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.

The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education.

A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.

We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides a moral standard for personal conduct.

An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.

There is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa.

A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.

When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.

Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.

Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.

Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.

Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.

Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.

The words "environment," "medium" denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies.

Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.

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.