John Dewey Quotes

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

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

Time with his old flail Beat me full sore; Till: Hold, I cried, I'll stand no more. Then I heard a wail And looking spied How love's little bow Had laid time low. ~ John Dewey

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

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. ~ John Dewey

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

The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. ~ J. Cammenga

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

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

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process. ~ John Dewey

The acquisition of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use, and that use is their contribution to a common and shared life ~ John Dewey

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

The intellectual content of religions has always finally adapted itself to scientific and social conditions after they have become clear ... For this reason I do not think that those who are concerned about the future of a religious attitude should trouble themselves about the conflict of science with traditional doctrines. ~ John Dewey

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

Let us say, in a word, that the correlation between the laws of mathematics and of physics is the evidence of the rational character of nature. Nature may be reduced to motions; and motions can be understood only as force, activity. But the laws which connect motions are fundamentally mathematical laws,- laws of reason. Hence force, activity, can be understood only as rational, as spiritual. Nature is thus seen to mean Activity, and Activity is seen to mean Intelligence ~ John Dewey

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. ~ John Dewey

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

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic. ~ John Dewey

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

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

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

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. ~ John Dewey

Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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

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. ~ John Dewey

The great waste comes from [the child's] inability to utilize the experience he gets outside of 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. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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

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

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

Insecurity cuts deeper and extends more widely than bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity. ~ John Dewey

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. ~ John Dewey

To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time. ~ John Dewey

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

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

it is of the highest concernment that care should be taken of its conduct is a moderate statement. While the power of thought frees us from servile subjection to instinct, appetite, and routine, it also brings with it the occasion and possibility of error and mistake. In elevating us above the brute, it opens to us the possibility of failures to which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink. ~ John Dewey

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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

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

Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections. ~ John Dewey

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 ~ John Dewey

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself ~ John Dewey

There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction. ~ John Dewey

Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling. ~ John Dewey

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. ~ John Dewey

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his [sic] world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. Otherwise the course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into making an experience is split. A divided world, a world whose parts and aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided personality. When the splitting-up reaches a certain point we call the person insane. A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done. ~ John Dewey

Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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

We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. ~ John Dewey

Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. ~ John Dewey

To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule. ~ Richard Hofstadter

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

Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling. ~ John Dewey

Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings ... For communication is not announcing things ... Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular ... the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen. ~ John Dewey

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

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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

The Professor took the old practices and studied them, worked out their mechanical principles and then devised a graded scientific set of tricks, but is based on the elementary laws of mechanics, a study of the equilibrium of the human body, the ways in which it is disturbed, how to recover your own and take advantage of the shifting of the center of gravity of the other person. The first thing that is taught is how to fall down without being hurt, that alone is worth the price of admission and ought to be taught in all our gyms. ~ John Dewey

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

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. ~ John Dewey

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

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

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos. ~ John Dewey

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

The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning. ~ John Dewey

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

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

a problem well put is half solved. ~ John Dewey

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

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

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

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

Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. ~ John Dewey

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

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

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

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. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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

If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey second-hand information as to what others think. Such taste never becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored reminder of what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. ~ John Dewey

The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

The lesson for progressive education is that it requires in an urgent degree, a degree more pressing than was incumbent upon former innovators, a philosophy of education based upon a philosophy of experience.
I remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies. ~ John Dewey

The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible. ~ John Dewey

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. ~ John Dewey

Various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools. ~ John Dewey

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

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. ~ John Dewey