John Dewey Quotes

208 quotes in 2504 categories

• Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man…
• We have three approaches at our disposal: the observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation serves to assemble the data, reflection to synthesise them and…
• 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,…
• Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right…
• 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…
• Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
• Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it…
• The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. ... Only that which has been organized into…
• Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.
• That the great majority of those who leave school should have some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief…
• 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…
• The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.
• Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because…
• 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.
• Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order
• Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.
• 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…
• 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…
• Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.
• Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.

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