John Dewey Quotes

347 Sourced Quotes

Pure reasoning as a means of arriving at truth is like the spider who spins a web out of himself.

John Dewey
For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the aesthetic.

John Dewey
In general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others.

John Dewey
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

John Dewey
The conduct of schools, based upon a new order of conception, is so much more difficult than is the management of schools which walk the beaten path.

John Dewey
Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

John Dewey
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.

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

John Dewey
Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.

John Dewey
Active experimentation must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.

John Dewey
What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.

John Dewey
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.

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

John Dewey
One code prevails in the family; another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon the school a steadying and integrating office.

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

John Dewey
If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up.

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

John Dewey
As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.

John Dewey
The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts — inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
When our schools truly become laboratories of knowledge-making, not mills fitted out with informationhoppers, there will no longer be need to discuss the place of science in education.

John Dewey
We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

John Dewey
Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs.

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

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

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

John Dewey
Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

John Dewey
Factual science may collect statistics, and make charts. But its predictions are, as has been well said, but past history reversed.

John Dewey