John Dewey - Democracy and Education (1916)

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The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.

John Dewey
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.

John Dewey
The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.

John Dewey
A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.

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
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
Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

John Dewey
In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.

John Dewey
Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.

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
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
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
Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.

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
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
Thinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous.

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
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

John Dewey