John Dewey Quotes

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.

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.

If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization.

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.

our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters.

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.

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.

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?

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.

In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves.

The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools

An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that that must community want for all it's children.

The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them.

It is not a nature cure, a system of faith healing, or a physical culture, or a medical treatment, or a semi-occult philosophy. As to what it is, Dewey's brief but striking description appeals most and has the least chance of being proved incorrect: 'It the Alexander Technique bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities.'

The way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and intellectually suspect.

it is not exact or relevant to say "I experience" or "I think." "It" experiences or is experienced, "it" thinks or is thought, is a juster phrase. Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves.

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.

In the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and passion.Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves - that is, means for the ends of others.

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

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

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.

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".

Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

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.

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.

The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life.

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."

Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.

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.

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.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.

There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.

No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interest of the few. And the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses. The essential need ... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.

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

we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.

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.

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.

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.

Preparation is a treacherous idea. In a certain sense every experience should do something to prepare a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality. That is the very meaning of growth, continuity, reconstruction of experience. But it is a mistake to suppose that the mere acquisition of a certain amount of arithmetic, geography, history, etc., which is taught and studied because it may be useful at some time in the future, has this effect, and it is a mistake to suppose that acquisition of skills in reading and figuring will automatically constitute preparation for their right and effective use under conditions very unlike those in which they were acquired.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.

The only thing that is unqualifiedly given is the total pervasive quality; and the objection to calling it "given" is that the word suggests something to which it is given, mind or thought or consciousness or whatever, as well possibly as something that gives.

Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life - physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools - it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances.

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.

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.

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.

If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.

The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities

Who can reckon up the loss of moral power that arises from the constant impression that nothing is worth doing in itself, but only as a preparation for something else, which in turn is only a getting ready for some genuinely serious end beyond?

I do not think that any thorough-going modification of college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction.

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.

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.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.

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.

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.

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.

Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.

We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.

Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.

To me faith means not worrying

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

When the organization called soul is free, moving and operative, initial as well as terminal, it is spirit. Qualities are both static, substantial, and transitive. Spirit quickens; it is not only alive, but spirit gives life. Animals are spirited, but man is a living spirit. He lives in his works and his works do follow him. Soul is form, spirit informs. It is the moving function of that of which soul is the substance. Perhaps the words soul and spirit are so heavily laden with traditional mythology and sophisticated doctrine that they must be surrendered; it may be impossible to recover for them in science and philosophy the realities designated in idiomatic speech. But the realities are there, by whatever names they be called.

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.

The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.

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.

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world....genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before....surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual....the artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized. The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Subordination of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does vi

Most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.

Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another.

The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural conditions. As they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors. Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and favoring conditions. Because the activities of children today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which have preceded.

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.

As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with ... dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself

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.

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.

Historically the great movements for human liberation have always been movements to change institutions and not to preserve them intact. It follows from what has been said that there have been movements to bring about a changed distribution of power to do - and power to think and to express thought is a power to do- so that there would be a more balanced, a more equal, even, and equitable system of human liberties.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows.

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms ... And what does one form matter any more than another? ... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea ... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure.

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.

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.

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.

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.

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits - marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further.

Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.

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

The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.

It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies ... which isolate mind and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.

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