100+ Quotes by John Dewey
John Dewey, a pioneering philosopher, profoundly shaped modern educational theory and pragmatist philosophy. His emphasis on experiential learning and the integration of education with practical life laid the foundation for progressive education. Dewey believed that education should be a process of active engagement, enabling students to develop critical thinking skills and problem-solving abilities. His ideas about learning through doing and the importance of fostering creativity and curiosity continue to influence educational practices worldwide. Beyond education, Dewey's broader philosophy focused on the interconnectedness of thought and action, emphasizing the importance of adapting ideas to changing circumstances. His work offers a timeless reminder that the pursuit of knowledge should be a dynamic and transformative endeavor, deeply intertwined with the challenges and opportunities of the real world.
John Dewey Quotes
Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process. (Meaning)
We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience. (Meaning)
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. (Meaning)
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. (Meaning)
If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. (Meaning)
The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning. (Meaning)
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. (Meaning)
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. (Meaning)
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire. (Meaning)
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. (Meaning)
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important. (Meaning)
We only think when we are confronted with problems. (Meaning)
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy. (Meaning)
Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists. (Meaning)
All genuine learning comes through experience. (Meaning)
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. (Meaning)
The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end (Meaning)
a problem well put is half solved. (Meaning)
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. (Meaning)
No man's credit is as good as his money. (Meaning)
Education is life itself. (Meaning)
Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. (Meaning)
We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.
Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.
I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.
If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.
How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.
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.
The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.
There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
We only think when we are confronted with problems.
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.
Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order
To me faith means not worrying.
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.
Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
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.
Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.
Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.
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.
We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference.
The result of the educative process is capacity for further 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.
The need for growth - what we might call immaturity - is not a negative state of being.
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.
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 self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.
Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?
Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.
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.
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
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.
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.
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
Hunger not to have, but to be
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.
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 aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.
Instruction is important.
The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.
Always make the other person feel important.
Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.
a problem well put is half solved.
The need for growth, for development, for change, is fundamental to life.
Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.
Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.
No man's credit is as good as his money.
All genuine education comes about through experience.
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
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.
Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.
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.
In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
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.
The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.
The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.
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.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
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.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.
How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?
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.
The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".
Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
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.
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.
The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.
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.
The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.
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.
Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.
Adults are naturally most conscious of directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so to do. As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them to do. But the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention on our part.
Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.
When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.
Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action. It thus helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.
Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.
It is part of the educator's responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.
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.
Consensus demands communication.
All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.
Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it.
Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.
All genuine learning comes through experience.
Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.
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.
...compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a separation of that mode of activity commonly called 'practice' from insight; of imagination from executive 'doing.' Each of these activities is then assigned its own place in which it must abide. Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature.
Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.
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.
Education must be understood as growth, or the facilitation of growth.
Thought is impossible without words.
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
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.
The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.
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.
Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.
When a school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious
Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.
The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to "bluff."
Adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.
Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge.
I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.
It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.
It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.
Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.
The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation...We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.
It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.
Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.
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.
In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object.
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.
Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.
― John Dewey Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
