John Dewey Quotes

208 quotes in 2504 categories

• 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…
• There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in…
• I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the…
• I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
• 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.
• Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.
• Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.
• Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.
• Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.
• It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.
• 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…
• Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
• Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
• Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.
• 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.

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