Top 100 Quotes About John Dewey
#1. Who was the founder of American education? John Dewey - you know that very well - card-carrying Communist. The American education system, in America - one of the so-called 'founders' was a Communist
Rafael Cruz
#2. Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: The
Dale Carnegie
#3. John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.
Alfie Kohn
#4. I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#5. I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated.
Spike Lee
#6. John Dewey was right that "failure is instructive," then Tolstoy's life is, well, an instructional gold mine.
Leo Tolstoy
#7. Booker T. Washington, Buddha, John Dewey, Leo Buscaglia, Moses and Jesus.
Jack Canfield
#8. 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.
John Dewey
#9. Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
John Dewey
#10. 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.
John Dewey
#11. Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.
John Dewey
#12. You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.
John Dewey
#13. Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
John Dewey
#14. We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience.
John Dewey
#15. Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.
John Dewey
#16. In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?
John Dewey
#17. As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
John Dewey
#18. 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
#19. 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.
John Dewey
#20. Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.
John Dewey
#21. We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
John Dewey
#22. The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
John Dewey
#23. To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.
John Dewey
#24. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
John Dewey
#25. The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic, religious.
John Dewey
#26. I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
John Dewey
#27. 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
#28. The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
John Dewey
#29. Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.
John Dewey
#30. All genuine education comes about through experience.
John Dewey
#31. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
John Dewey
#32. Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order
John Dewey
#33. In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
John Dewey
#34. 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
#35. Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.
John Dewey
#36. The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
John Dewey
#37. 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.
John Dewey
#38. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
John Dewey
#39. It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.
John Dewey
#40. I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
John Dewey
#41. 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
#42. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
#43. 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.
John Dewey
#45. 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
#46. The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.
John Dewey
#47. Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.
John Dewey
#48. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
John Dewey
#49. The demand for liberty is a demand for power, either for possession of powers of action not already possessed or for retention and expansion of powers already possessed.
John Dewey
#50. Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
John Dewey
#51. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.
John Dewey
#52. Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
John Dewey
#53. 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
#54. 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.
John Dewey
#55. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
John Dewey
#56. We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
John Dewey
#57. Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.
John Dewey
#58. Thought is impossible without words.
John Dewey
#59. 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
#60. Science is a systematic means of gaining reliable knowledge.
John Dewey
#61. The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities
John Dewey
#62. 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.
John Dewey
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
John Dewey
#67. Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.
John Dewey
#68. 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
#69. It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.
John Dewey
#70. The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.
John Dewey
#71. Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
John Dewey
#72. 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.
John Dewey
#73. All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.
John Dewey
#74. 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.
John Dewey
#75. Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.
John Dewey
#76. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. - Melvil Dewey, 1876
John Palfrey
#77. The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
John Dewey
#78. 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
#79. The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.
John Dewey
#80. 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
#81. Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.
John Dewey
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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.
John Dewey
#85. Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.
John Dewey
#86. The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.
John Dewey
#87. The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.
John Dewey
#88. 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
#89. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this sense is the method of social control.
John Dewey
#90. 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.
John Dewey
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.
John Dewey
#94. The educative value of manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play, depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are dramatizations.
John Dewey
#95. Intelligence is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn, and courage in readjustment.
John Dewey
#96. We only think when confronted with a problem.
John Dewey
#97. 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.
John Dewey
#98. 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
#99. Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.
John Dewey
#100. 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.
John Dewey
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