John Dewey Quotations

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

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

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

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

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

No man's credit is as good as his money.

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.

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

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

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

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

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

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

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

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.

We eat out all the time, and you have no idea what you're eating.

We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos

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

Those outages were caused by separate equipment failures,

The deepest urge in human nature is "the desire to be important

We only think when we are confronted with a problem

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.

The reason the outages affected the same group and not other areas is because those customers are served by the same cable loop and the cable loop was affected by equipment failures, ... But the cable itself is in good working order.

There is something going on at Northeastern. We sent a technician out there and all our equipment checked out fine. Right now the customer is looking at what issues they may have.

School is not preparation for life, but school is life

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.

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.

Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.

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.

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.

Instruction is important.

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

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.

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

All of us have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the result, we do not control them.

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

In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves.

There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another.

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

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

Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.

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

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.

To me faith means not worrying.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

Schools are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true context.

Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.

The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.

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.

Where there is giving there must be taking.

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

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

If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In such a state, every act is alike to him.

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

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

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.

The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

All direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.

When we consider the close connection between science and industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining literary studies. We have before us the need of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly democratic.

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.

The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.

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

Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated

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

The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process.

Even dogs and horses have their actions modified by association with human beings; they form different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary.

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.

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

To have an idea of a thing is not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it.

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