John Dewey Cat Quotations

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.

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

Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose.

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.

The parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a community. But this would involve communication. Each would have to know what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own purpose and progress.

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

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

One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.

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

Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it.

Various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools.

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

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. . . . [A] government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect . . . their governors are educated.

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.‎

Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

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.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.

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

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

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.

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

All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.

The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic, religious.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

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

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

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that that must community want for all it's children.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory, was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the United States are composed of a combination of different groups with different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced environment for the young.

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

Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.

Consensus demands communication.

Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.

It is part of the educator's responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.

If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.

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

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge - a common understanding - likemindedness as the sociologists say.

Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.

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

Education is life itself.

No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told it is to the one to whom it is told another fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.

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

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself.

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.