John Dewey - Experience Quotes

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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.

John Dewey
That the ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature.

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

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

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect - its effect upon conscious experience - we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.

John Dewey
The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences.

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

John Dewey
As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

John Dewey
Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.

John Dewey
A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning.

John Dewey
We define science as systematized knowledge, but the definition is wholly ambiguous. Does it mean the body of facts, the subject-matter? Or does it mean the processes by which something fit to be called knowledge is brought into existence, and order introduced into the flux of experience?

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.

John Dewey
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.

John Dewey
Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies.

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

John Dewey
To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified.

John Dewey
The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

John Dewey
Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.

John Dewey
A philosophy has no private store of knowledge or methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge and principles from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are diffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.

John Dewey
Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.

John Dewey
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.

John Dewey
To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.

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
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.

John Dewey
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.

John Dewey