John Dewey Quotes

347 Sourced Quotes

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.

John Dewey
Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations.

John Dewey
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!

John Dewey
Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.

John Dewey
The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

John Dewey
The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.

John Dewey
Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
If there is any knowledge which is of most worth it is knowledge of the ways by which anything is entitled to be called knowledge instead of being mere opinion or guess-work or dogma.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
If the eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an outside interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to do.

John Dewey
The facts of nature are multitudinous, inexhaustible, they begin nowhere and end nowhere in particular, and hence are not, just as facts, the best material for the education of those whose lives are centered in quite local situations and whose careers are irretrievably partial and specific. Science as Subject-Matter and as Method

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

John Dewey
A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.

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

John Dewey
Even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on receives little attention as compared with physical output.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter.

John Dewey
What would happen to philosophy if it ceased to deal with the problem of reality and knowledge at large? From this point of view, the problem of philosophy concerns the interaction of our judgments about ends to be sought with the knowledge of the means for achieving them.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
[Philosophy] has tried to combine acceptance of the conclusions of scientific inquiry as to the natural world with the acceptance of doctrines about the nature of mind and knowledge which originated before there was such a thing as systematic experimental inquiry. Between the two there is an inherent incompatibility.

John Dewey
Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.

John Dewey
Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.

John Dewey
A response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were, against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it.

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

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

John Dewey