Top 441 Quotes & Sayings by John Dewey - Page 2

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

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

Consensus demands communication.

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

I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.

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

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

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.

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

The need for growth, for development, for change, is fundamental to life.

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

In a world that has so largely engaged in a mad and often brutally harsh race for material gain by means of ruthless competition, it behooves the school to make ceaseless and intelligently organized effort to develop above all else the will for co-operation and the spirit which sees in every other individual one who has an equal right to share in the cultural and material fruits of collective human invention, industry, skill and knowledge

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

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.

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

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. 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.

It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.

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

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.

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

That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.

Instruction is important.

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.

Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

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

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

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

Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.

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

Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.

Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.

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.

We have three approaches at our disposal: the observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation serves to assemble the data, reflection to synthesise them and experimentation to test the results of the synthesis. The observation of nature must be assiduous, just as reflection must be profound, and experimentation accurate. These three approaches are rarely found together, which explains why creative geniuses are so rare.

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

The acquisition however perfectly of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use as a contribution to a common and shared life.

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

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

Thought is impossible without words.

Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated

Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

It is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.

The need for growth - what we might call immaturity - is not a negative state of being.

Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community would be possible.

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.

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

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.

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

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.

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

Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.