John Dewey Quotes

By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.

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

Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life.

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.

All direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.

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.

Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.

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.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.

I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and cultureof their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.

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

Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.

There is no greater egoism than that of learning when it is treated simply as a mark of personal distinction to be held and cherished for its own sake. ... [K]knowledge is a possession held in trust for the furthering of the well-being of all

Many of the obstacles for change which have been attributed to human nature are in fact due to the inertia of institutions and to the voluntary desire of powerful classes to maintain the existing status.

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

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

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

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

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

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

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.

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

The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality.

You can teach students to develop the ability to think reflectively, and you can help them understand what this means, but if they are not inclined to do so they never will.

When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.

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.

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

The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education.

A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action.

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

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