John Dewey quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Dewey

John Dewey Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Dewey on Wise Famous Quotes.

As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools

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

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

There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.

we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.

All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.

Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.

Balance is balancing.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

A problem well-defined is a problem half solved.

Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.

Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

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

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.

The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions.

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

Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.

To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

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

All genuine education comes about through experience.

Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

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

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

Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on general principles.

Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.

One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

Thought is impossible without words.

We only think when confronted with a problem.

It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.

Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.

Most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.

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

What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.

Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.

The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.

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

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

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

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.

Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.

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

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

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.

The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities

Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.

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

Science is a systematic means of gaining reliable knowledge.

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

Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?

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

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

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

An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.

We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that that must community want for all it's children.

No man's credit is as good as his money.

How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?

Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.

Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.

One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.

The conduct of schools, based upon a new order of conception, is so much more difficult than is the management of schools which walk the beaten path.

No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.

Hunger not to have, but to be

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

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.

Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.

Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.

Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.