John Dewey Quotes

347 Sourced Quotes

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

John Dewey
Many a student has acquired dexterity and skill in laboratory methods without its ever occurring to him that they have anything to do with constructing beliefs that are alone worthy of the title of knowledge.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action.

John Dewey
As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey