John Dewey Quotes

208 quotes in 2504 categories

• 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…
• Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.
• Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.
• As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.
• Nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving.
• 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…
• 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…
• [T]he schools, through reliance upon the spur of competition and the bestowing of special honors and prizes, only build up and strengthen the disposition that…
• 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…
• In a world that has so largely engaged in a mad and often brutally harsh race for material gain by means of ruthless competition, it…
• 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…
• 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…
• There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of…
• Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling…
• 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…
• No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told it is to the one…
• 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…
• 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…
• One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.
• 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…

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