John Dewey - Society Quotes

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The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with... dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.

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
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
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
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
Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.

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

John Dewey
As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a community; each business group, each club, is another.

John Dewey
By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

John Dewey
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. To free one's mind of chains is to free it of the care of what is acceptable or viewed so by society, this is when true freedom is discovered.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

John Dewey
A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits—marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further.

John Dewey
Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.

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

John Dewey
An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.

John Dewey
Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.

John Dewey
Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—likemindedness as the sociologists say.

John Dewey
Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself

John Dewey
We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society.

John Dewey