Quotes from John Dewey

It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

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.

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

Consensus demands communication.

An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.

The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

Every living being needs continually renewed, and education is simply the chief process by which renewal occurs.

Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up.

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.

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.

Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.