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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
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
Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process. -- 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
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
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. -- John Dewey
I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals. -- John Dewey
If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization. -- 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
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. -- John Dewey
All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral. -- John Dewey
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. -- John Dewey
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
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
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
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
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
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
Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done. -- John Dewey
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that that must community want for all it's children. -- John Dewey
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
Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in. -- John Dewey
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
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness. -- John Dewey
One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart. -- John Dewey
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
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
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
If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow. -- John Dewey
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
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
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
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
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 -- John Dewey
The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged. -- John Dewey
Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues. -- John Dewey
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
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 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
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
The result of the educative process is capacity for further education. -- John Dewey
I do not think that any thorough-going modification of college curriculum would be possible without a modification of the methods of instruction. -- John Dewey
Science is a systematic means of gaining reliable knowledge. -- John Dewey
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
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
Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations. -- John Dewey
The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed. -- 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
wonder is the mother of all science. -- John Dewey
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
All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate. -- John Dewey
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. -- John Dewey
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action. -- John Dewey
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
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
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." -- John Dewey
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
Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal. -- John Dewey
Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact. -- 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
Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal. -- 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
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier. -- 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
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
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
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
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 educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end. -- John Dewey
We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience. -- 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
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
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? -- John Dewey
All genuine education comes about through experience. -- John Dewey
Most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. -- John Dewey
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
Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life. -- John Dewey
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. -- John Dewey
Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state. -- John Dewey
An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. -- 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
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
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
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. -- 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
When "reality" is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import; at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeableemotional state. -- John Dewey
The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems. -- John Dewey
All genuine learning comes through experience. -- John Dewey
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
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences. -- John Dewey
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? -- 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
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved. -- John Dewey
A problem well-defined is a problem half solved. -- John Dewey
How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound? -- John Dewey
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
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
We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion. -- John Dewey
The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons". -- John Dewey
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
Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality. -- John Dewey
Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order -- John Dewey
Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies. -- John Dewey
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. -- John Dewey
As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. -- John Dewey
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
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
Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. -- 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
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society. -- John Dewey
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
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
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. -- John Dewey
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail. -- 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
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
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. To free one's mind of chains is to free it of the care of what is acceptable or viewed so by society, this is when true freedom is discovered. -- John Dewey
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
The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end. -- John Dewey
Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them. -- John Dewey
Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself. -- John Dewey
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. -- 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
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
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
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
Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known. -- John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. -- John Dewey
Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. -- 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
To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. -- 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
Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process. -- John Dewey
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
Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home. -- John Dewey
No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others. -- John Dewey
Education is life itself. -- John Dewey
The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. -- John Dewey
Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative. -- 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
Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. -- John Dewey
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
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
A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such. -- John Dewey
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
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 should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context. -- John Dewey
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. -- 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
We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice. -- John Dewey
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
Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social. -- John Dewey
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
It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children. -- 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
The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities -- 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
Thought is impossible without words. -- John Dewey
Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying. -- John Dewey
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts. -- John Dewey
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. -- John Dewey
Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. -- John Dewey
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
We only think when confronted with a problem. -- John Dewey
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
The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic. -- John Dewey
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
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. -- 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
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure. -- John Dewey
To me faith means not worrying -- John Dewey
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
Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. -- 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
Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had. -- John Dewey
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. -- John Dewey
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. -- John Dewey
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. -- John Dewey
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools -- John Dewey
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
In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences. -- John Dewey
New inventions, new machines, new methods of transportation and intercourse are making over the whole scene of action year by year. It is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station in life. -- John Dewey
Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated -- John Dewey
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important. -- John Dewey
The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning. -- John Dewey
The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt. -- John Dewey
Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France. -- John Dewey
Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import. -- 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
Education Proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws"- If the patterns of institutions, customs, and laws are broken for this philosophy education should fix itself. There should be several different things taught instead of one "Supreme Factor. -- 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
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
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
Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them. -- John Dewey
Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life. -- 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
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment. -- John Dewey
There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something. -- John Dewey
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. -- John Dewey
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties. -- John Dewey
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril. -- John Dewey
Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized. -- 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
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
Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling. -- John Dewey
Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking. -- John Dewey
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. -- John Dewey
Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life. -- John Dewey
Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other. -- John Dewey
Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate
unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land -- John Dewey
Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. -- John Dewey
The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give. -- John Dewey
The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind. -- John Dewey
Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act. -- 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
The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat. -- John Dewey
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. -- John Dewey
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
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. -- John Dewey
Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals. -- John Dewey
If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. -- John Dewey
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
It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought. -- John Dewey
Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition -- John Dewey
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. -- John Dewey
Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and the value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. -- 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
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. -- John Dewey
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
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching. -- John Dewey
Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. -- John Dewey
The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth -- John Dewey
The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education. -- John Dewey
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
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy. -- John Dewey
Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other. -- John Dewey
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. -- John Dewey
The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. -- John Dewey
Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. -- John Dewey
A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action. -- John Dewey
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. -- John Dewey
In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. -- John Dewey
a problem well put is half solved. -- John Dewey
We only think when we are confronted with problems. -- John Dewey
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
Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced. -- John Dewey
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
Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action. -- John Dewey
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire. -- John Dewey
Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man. -- John Dewey
Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists. -- John Dewey
Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. [Without these one] fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge. -- John Dewey
Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. -- John Dewey
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
No man's credit is as good as his money. -- 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
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
We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides a moral standard for personal conduct. -- John Dewey
Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material. -- John Dewey
That which distinguishes the Soviet system both from other national systems and from the progressive schools of other countries is the conscious control of every educational procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose. -- 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
It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties. -- John Dewey
The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself -- 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
Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies. -- John Dewey
As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow. -- John Dewey
Nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving. -- John Dewey
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
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
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
Balance is balancing. -- John Dewey
Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. -- John Dewey
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo. -- John Dewey
Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on general principles. -- John Dewey
Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association. -- John Dewey
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
We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. -- John Dewey
Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys. -- John Dewey
Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning? -- John Dewey
Hunger not to have, but to be -- John Dewey
