Top 100 John Dewey Quotes
#1. 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.
John Dewey
#2. The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
John Dewey
#3. 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.
John Dewey
#4. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
John Dewey
#5. It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say "that is red" instead of "that reddens," either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.
John Dewey
#6. The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
John Dewey
#7. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
John Dewey
#8. Now in many cases - too many cases - 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.
John Dewey
#9. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
#10. By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
John Dewey
#11. Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.
John Dewey
#12. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
John Dewey
#13. Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind.
John Dewey
#14. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
John Dewey
#15. 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.
John Dewey
#16. 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.
John Dewey
#17. A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question; it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.
John Dewey
#18. The premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
John Dewey
#19. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect - its effect upon conscious experience - we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.
John Dewey
#20. For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.
John Dewey
#21. An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.
John Dewey
#22. 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.
John Dewey
#23. 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.
John Dewey
#24. The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.
John Dewey
#25. Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. 'Thought' represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.
John Dewey
#26. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement
John Dewey
#27. The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.
John Dewey
#28. Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.
John Dewey
#29. Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.
John Dewey
#30. Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature ... This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.
John Dewey
#31. The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.
John Dewey
#32. The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.
John Dewey
#33. Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.
John Dewey
#34. The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education.
John Dewey
#35. 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.
John Dewey
#36. A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.
John Dewey
#37. An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.
John Dewey
#38. Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.
John Dewey
#39. To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions
that is art.
John Dewey
#40. Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.
John Dewey
#41. Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.
John Dewey
#42. The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.
John Dewey
#43. The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic ... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.
John Dewey
#44. It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.
John Dewey
#45. Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
John Dewey
#46. I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I'm an atheist.
[Letter to Max Otto]
John Dewey
#47. The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".
John Dewey
#48. There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.
John Dewey
#49. As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.
John Dewey
#50. 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.
John Dewey
#51. 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.
John Dewey
#52. 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.
John Dewey
#53. 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.
John Dewey
#54. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that that must community want for all it's children.
John Dewey
#55. No man's credit is as good as his money.
John Dewey
#56. Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.
John Dewey
#57. wonder is the mother of all science.
John Dewey
#58. Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
John Dewey
#59. Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.
John Dewey
#60. A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
John Dewey
#61. A problem well-defined is a problem half solved.
John Dewey
#62. Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.
John Dewey
#63. Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?
John Dewey
#64. 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.
John Dewey
#65. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.
John Dewey
#66. How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?
John Dewey
#67. Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
John Dewey
#68. 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.
John Dewey
#69. As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.
John Dewey
#70. 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.
John Dewey
#71. Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
John Dewey
#72. The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
John Dewey
#73. 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.
John Dewey
#74. 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.
John Dewey
#75. Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated
John Dewey
#76. 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.
John Dewey
#77. The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.
John Dewey
#78. The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
John Dewey
#79. The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.
John Dewey
#80. Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
John Dewey
#81. One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.
John Dewey
#82. 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.
John Dewey
#83. Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.
John Dewey
#84. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
John Dewey
#85. Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.
John Dewey
#86. 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.
John Dewey
#88. 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.
John Dewey
#89. 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.
John Dewey
#90. But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.
John Dewey
#91. 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.
John Dewey
#92. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
John Dewey
#93. One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
John Dewey
#94. Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.
John Dewey
#95. 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.
John Dewey
#96. 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.
John Dewey
#97. 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.
John Dewey
#98. Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.
John Dewey
#99. We only think when we are confronted with problems.
John Dewey
#100. Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.
John Dewey
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