Quotes from John Dewey

Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.

The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences.

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.

Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.

We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.

Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him.

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.

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

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

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. Condi-tions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

We only think when we are confronted with a problem.

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

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

a problem well put is half solved.

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.

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.

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.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

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

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.

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.