Best 405 quotes of John Dewey on MyQuotes

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

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.

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

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

Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.

Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.

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

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

Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.

Resort to military force is a first sure sign that we are giving up the struggle for the democratic way of life, and that the Old World has conquered morally as well as geographically succeeding in imposing upon us its ideals and methods.

Schools are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true context.

Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.

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

Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.

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.

Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.

Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.‎

Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.

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

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

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.

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

Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.

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.

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.

Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.

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

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

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

That the great majority of those who leave school should have some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief does not seem unreasonable. Nor is it absurd to expect that they should go forth with a lively interest in the ways in which knowledge is improved and a marked distaste for all conclusions reached in disharmony with the methods of scientific inquiry.

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.

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.

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.

The activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure. But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to others.

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

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

The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.

The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.

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

The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.

The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.

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.